BRAVE NEW ART WORLD by artillerymag

Brave New Art World JAN/FEB 2021

Made in L.A.

20 20

Visit hammer.ucla.edu and huntington.org for details about programs and artist projects presented off-site and online.

a version Presented by:

FULTON LEROY WASHINGTON (AKA “MR. WASH”), POLITICAL TEARS OBAMA (DETAIL), 2008. OIL ON STRETCHED CANVAS. 24 × 18 IN. (61 × 45.7 CM). COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

BRENNA YOUNGBLOOD MARCH 6 – APRIL 17, 2021

roberts projects

robertsprojectsla.com

FICTIONS IN FRAGMENTS

FU SITE

SOLO EXHIBITION JAN 23 - FEB 27, 2021

KYLIN GALLERY

8634 WISHIRE BLVD BEVERLY HILLS

GOOD COMPANY: PT. 1 Inaugural Exhibition | 6150 Wilshire Blvd Co-Organized By Anat Ebgi & Paul Schimmel

JEN DENIKE ALEC EGAN TINA GIROUARD ELIAS HANSEN JIBADE-KHALIL HUFFMAN

2660 S La Cienega Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90034 +1 (310) 838 - 2770

GREG ITO NEIL RAITT ROBERT RUSSELL SIGRID SANDSTRÖM JAY STUCKEY

ANAT EBGI

SAMANTHA THOMAS SARAH ANN WEBER JANET WERNER COSMO WHYTE FAITH WILDING

6150 Wilshire Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90048 +1 (323) 272 - 3418

CHRIS TRUEMAN

Absence of Atmosphere

WTM, 2020. Acrylic and Acrylic spray paint on Yupo paper mounted with artist’s frame, 58 × 38 inches

January 15, 2021 – March 5, 2021

EDWARD CELLA ART & ARCHITECTURE

@ Thomas Lavin | Pacific Design Center 8687 Melrose Ave., B310, West Hollywood, CA 90069 323.525.0053 edwardcella.com

VANESSA PRAGER: STATIC FEBRUARY 20 – APRIL 10, 2021

831 N. HIGHLAND AVENUE, LOS ANGELES, CA 90038 (323) 462-2790 | dianerosenstein.com

Samuelle Richardson

El Camino College Art Gallery 16007 Crenshaw Boulevard, Torrance, CA 90506 smeiers@elcamino.edu 310/660-3010 Ghost Dogs, installation, mixed media, 45 x 45 x 50 inches

photo Martin Cox

ISSUE 3, VOLUME 15, JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2021

Table of Contents

Brave New Art World F E AT U R E S Math Bass - by william j. simmons Yasmine Nasser Diaz - by julie schulte Dynasty Handbag - by taylor doran Monument Lab - by clayton campbell The Box & LAPD - by kelly rappleye

F E AT U R E D

22 26 30 36 38

R E V I E W

Made in L.A. - by shana nys dambrot

C O LU M N S DECODER: Just the Minimum - by zak smith ART BRIEF: Museum Wokeness Pt2 - by stephen j. golberg SIGHTS UNSCENE: Take Your Temp? - by lara jo regan

C O N T I N U E D

16 18 20

ON THE COVER: Math Bass, Newz!, 2020, (detail) 50 x 66 in., courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. See page 22. ABOVE: Kader Attia, Rochers Carrés (Square Rocks), 2008/2020, (detail) courtesy Regen Projects. RIGHT: Dynasty Handbag at “Weirdo Night.” NEXT PAGE, TOP: Illustration by Zak Smith; BOTTOM: Beyond Baroque by Sabrina Tarasoff, Gail Kaszynski, still from Fear of Poetry, 1982, courtesy of the artist, ©Gail Kaszynski.

51 36 30

Table of Contents

From the Editor Dear Reader,

50 16 C O LU M N S

C O N T. 48 56

OFF THE WALL: Truth is Dead - by anthony ausgang BUNKER VISION: Spooked - by skot armstrong

D E PA R T M E N T S 14 46 56 56 61 62

SHOPTALK by Scarlet Cheng: LA Art News PHOTO: James Welling - by colin westerbeck POEMS: klipschutz; John Tottenham ASK BABS: Turn A Blind Eye - by babs rappleye COMICS by Butcher & Wood: Art-Musement Park RECONNOITER: Kevin Duffy

R E V I E W S 50 50 51 51 52 52

Kader Attia @ Regen Projects Rodney McMillian @ Vielmetter Los Angeles Rachel Rosenthal @ Roberts Projects Yolanda González @ Bermudez Projects “The Edge of Order” @ Wonzimer Gallery Adam Pendleton @ David Kordansky Gallery

I was going to start this letter with a Happy New Year! I should, right? It will be 2021 when this January/February issue comes out. We will have brought in the New Year, albeit with less fanfare than usual—it doesn’t take a soothsayer to predict that last year’s malaise will follow us into the New Year. Yes, we have a new president and VP. I’m very happy about that, but they have their work cut out for them. The art world has its work cut out for itself too. In this issue, which we call Brave New Art World, we present a determined and adaptable art world with a relentless drive to seek answers and make new discoveries. Galleries closed? That hasn’t slowed down artists from making art; quite the contrary. This is the bravery that these working artists are displaying—they can’t be stopped. There’s nothing like a tragedy to get the creative juices flowing. In these catastrophic times, the art world couldn’t be more alive. Artists are adapting to all the changes by utilizing social media and mobile art, or just holing up in their studios, away from the chaos, attempting to maintain their perspective, but still producing work. Artists naturally respond to their environments, whether it’s domestic strife or global mayhem. Boldness, honesty and perseverance are the key ingredients of the Brave New Art World. Our cover artist Math Bass paints in a bold, vibrant way—familiar yet strikingly original. LA performer Dynasty Handbag defines bold in her idiosyncratic way. Her performances have been canceled, but she creates new opportunities for herself continually. Honesty and integrity are in abundance in contributor Kelly Rappleye’s story on Mara McCarthy of The Box gallery and Skid Row’s performing arts organization Los Angeles Poverty Department. Legal art columnist Stephen Goldberg addresses the machinations within museums that are struggling with ethical issues and responsibilities to their communities. Museums must strive for equality in their collections and employment, but not at the expense of ill-considered deaccession. Clayton Campbell checks in with Monument Lab addressing the current trend of long overdue statue-removal. And when our columnist Zak Smith just wants to visit a museum, even a courtyard will do. There’s plenty more in this issue, proving once again the enduring vitality of the art world. It’s been a tough year indeed; millions of people have died, millions are unemployed. (That’s millions, people!) We who read this letter are the lucky ones. I’m surprised Artillery has even survived throughout all this. In many ways we should look back on 2020 and be grateful for what we have now. Maybe I can squeeze in a Happy New Year after all, and let’s make the best of it, learn some valuable lessons and move on to a better, braver New Art World.

C O N T R I B U TO R S

Taylor Doran is an artist, writer, and editor. She holds an MA in Philosophy from UC Riverside and has taught at UC Riverside and UCLA. She previously edited zines for Cassandra Press and co-hosted a monthly reading entitled Plate Special. She lives in Los Angeles, CA.

S TA F F Tulsa Kinney Editor/Publisher

EDITORIAL Bill Smith - creative director Emily Wells - associate editor John Tottenham - copy editor/poetry editor John Seeley - proof/copy editor Dave Shulman - graphic design Frances Cocksedge - editorial assistant

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS William J. Simmons is a PhD candidate and Provost Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Southern California. His essays, poetry and scholarship have been published in numerous international magazines, journals and monographs.

Julie Schulte is an LA-based writer. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine where she teaches a course on the rhetoric of motherhood. She writes about art and culture and her nonfiction has appeared in publications like The Atlantic. Instagram: @julesvernova

Scarlet Cheng, John David O’Brien, Tucker Neel

COLUMNISTS Skot Armstrong, Stephen J. Goldberg, Doug Harvey, Kelly Rappleye, C. Kaye Rawlings, Lara Jo Regan, Zak Smith

CONTRIBUTORS Anthony Ausgang, Lane Barden, Ezrha Jean Black, Betty Ann Brown, Susan Butcher & Carol Wood, Kate Caruso, Bianca Collins, Genie Davis, David DiMichele, Max King Cap, Angela Groom, Tom Knechtel, Alexia Lewis, Richard May, Christopher Michno, Yxta Maya Murray, Barbara Morris, Carrie Paterson, Leanna Robinson, Julie Schulte, William J. Simmons, Cole Sweetwood, Avery Wheless, Eve Wood, Jody Zellen NEW YORK: Arthur Bravo, John Haber, Sarah Sargent

PHOTOGRAPHERS Lynda Burdick, Rainer Hosch, Tyler Hubby, Eric Minh Swenson

ADMINISTRATION Clayton Campbell has been writing about art since 1997. A regular contributor to Artillery, he focuses on artists whose ideas, questions, and practices promote an equitable and harmonious social environment.

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ARTILLERYMAG.COM Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic based in DTLA. She is the Arts Editor for the L.A. Weekly, and a contributor to Flaunt, Art and Cake, Palm Springs Life, and others. She studied Art History at Vassar College, writes essays for books and catalogs, and is a dedicated Instagram photographer and author of experimental short fiction.

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Online Exhibition

Art in the Plague Year There is Another World, But It Is in This One

artintheplagueyear.com ALSO ON VIEW AT

virtualucrarts.ucr.edu

LIFT YOUR HEAD Bruce Davidson and the Evolution of Seeing Bruce Davidson, Birmingham, Alabama, 1963. From the series Times of Change, 1961-1965. © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos.

ANALOGUES Travon Free Travon Free, Untitled, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

We are currently closed to the public. Visit ucrarts.ucr.edu and follow @ucrarts on social media for up-to-date information about reopening and more engagement with our exhibitions and collections.

S H O P TA L K

SoCal’s Museums Museums have been shut down (again), which doesn’t effect the city of Los Angeles too much as museums weren’t reopened except for a very short week or so. Neither LACMA nor the Hammer ever reopened after mid-March shutdowns and, alas, the Hammer-Huntington’s joint exhibition “Made in L.A. 2020” (reviewed in this issue) is languishing in their galleries. Pomona College’s Benton Museum of Art, in a brand new $44 million building, was supposed to open this fall, but COVID postponed that plan. The three opening exhibitions are installed, however, and after months of planning and re-planning, I finally made it in for a visit. It’s a simple, contemporary building organized around a courtyard that opens on one side to the street. In one corner of the courtyard is a commissioned bronze sculpture by one of LA’s most celebrated artists, Alison Saar. The 12-foottall Imbue (2020) depicts Yemoja, West African deity of the waters and mother of all living things, a protector of women and children. She stands with a series of buckets and water containers on her head, while pouring out a stream of water from a pail. As typical of Saar’s oeuvre, the figure is strong and bold, a force to be reckoned with. Inside, the exhibition space is twice the size of the old building’s, and the flow from gallery to gallery feels a lot more comfortable. Two galleries display “Of Aether and Earthe,” an exhibition of Saar’s sculpture and installation, as well as drawing and painting. The show is thematically woven around the elements of water and earth, says senior curator Rebecca McGrew. (A parallel exhibition will open at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena in 2021.) It is arguably the best installation of Saar’s work I’ve ever seen, with the 3D work very beautifully laid out and lit, thanks to exhibition designer Gary Murphy. One sculpture that’s especially memorable is Breach (2016) which shows an African American woman poling through imagined waters—on her head is balanced her worldly possessions, a stack of trunks, a chair, a barrel, and several pails. There’s something about trying to balance all those things atop a human frame that feels both daunting and also very heroic. Breach was inspired by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, with its echo in Hurricane Katrina and its disastrous aftermath. Other inaugural shows at the Benton are a selection of Alia Ali’s work and a look at what Pomona College holds in its own collection – quite surprising, ranging from Renaissance painting to contemporary ceramics. Ali’s photomontage work is in the reception area and corridor and her video installation in a special gallery. McGrew says they will continue to show contemporary and historical exhibitions as before, although “We hope to showcase our collection more, it’s been an underutilized resource.” For more information and projected opening date, check out their website: https://www.pomona.edu/museum.

Kirsten Deirup, Thigh High in the Vallery, 2019, gouache and egg tempera on paper mounted on panel, 30 x 20 in, photo by Jacob Vasa.

Right: Alison Saar, Imbue, 2020, at entrance to Benton Museum of Art.

S CA R L E T

C H E N G

Somber reflection and bright optimism are the watchwords as we look to the New Year. There will no New Year’s Eve bashes, no Rose Bowl Parade, no January 1 potlucks, but maybe we will raise a toast in small RL gatherings or on Zoom, as some of us mourn the untimely passing of friends and family. Those two sentiments, somber reflection and bright optimism, are signaled in the very choice(s) of 2021’s “Color of the Year” by the Pantone Color Institute. Probably better known to designers than artists, the organization helps set a theme color for each year, although this year they’ve chosen two—PANTONE 17-5104 Ultimate Gray and PANTONE 13-0647 Illuminating. Ultimate Gray is a medium-dark, warm gray, neutral but serious, and Illuminating is a lemony yellow. “The selection of two independent colors highlight how different elements come together to express a message of strength and hopefulness that is both enduring and uplifting,” said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, in a press release, “conveying the idea that it’s not about one color or one person, it’s about more than one.” Yes, the decision was made with COVID and politics under consideration. “We know we’re living in an unusual time,” said the Institute’s Vice President Laurie Pressman in a TIME magazine interview: “Whether it’s about the pandemic or the uprisings around the world, we’re trying to imagine the future as we move into this very different time.” Since that announcement, our first COVID vaccine has been approved by the FDA, and the Electoral College has declared Joe Biden the next president of the United States, both very good news.

Gallery Glimpses Here are a couple shows I thought especially good on my recent (limited) rounds. One was “Kirsten Dierup: Remote View” (through Jan. 2) at De Boer Gallery, south of downtown LA. Deirup’s paintings of various women’s shoes in Surrealistic landscapes are kicky and imaginative. A lime green stiletto poses in the midst of a gnarled forest clearing in Oracle, a platform shoe sits in the soupy stew of Swamp Pump. The gallery is small but choice—be sure to ring and arrange your visit before going. One of the best shows of the year has to be Mark Steven Greenfield’s, “Black Madonna” which just closed at William Turner Gallery. His small paintings are jewels of artistic insurrection, with a format appropriated from Renaissance devotional paintings featuring Mary cradling the baby Jesus. Except now both mother and Jesus are African American figures, with updated backgrounds of Confederate statues being pulled down in public spaces or a hooded Ku Klux Klansman being burned at the stake. These works are exquisitely painted and reinterpreted. They suggest that, yes, we can remake history by reimagining it. So here’s to remaking history in 2021—first we imagined the change, now we will live it. Happy 2021, in all its solemnity and hope!

NEW YEAR; New Color

Just Give Me the Minimum BY ZAK SMITH D E C O D E R

Illustration by Zak Smith

I don’t want to paint anymore. I want to go to a big gallery or a museum. It doesn’t even need a roof anymore—I would go to a courtyard at this point. Not a nice one, necessarily; it can have one end open to a field of that grass that precedes that kind of boring line of trees that screens an exurban stretch of one-car-per-three-minutes interstate. It can have the interstate, even, if it’s just not too many cars too often. I just need weather warm enough that I don’t have to move around to keep warm. It can be gray, I’m alright with that and even alright with the other three sides of the courtyard having institutional baked-brick facades, like a junior high. I won’t need a bench and I don’t even mind the courtyard having other visitors, as long as they didn’t ask why I was laying on my back in my fall coat on concrete flagstones that have that awful sesame-candy texture and the big gaps between. Just as long as they walked at a respectful distance and assumed I was eccentric. It would be nice if there weren’t ants. I’m okay with the courtyard having one of those metal sculptures, like the frame inside a globe finished wrong or not finished, with some of the welds sanded down into silver all scrabbly. Where just by looking at the texture of the steel you can hear the iron squawk of someone installing it who doesn’t care. I’d also let there be one of those late-Surrealist things that’s like a little over man-height with a man-

face implied or half-carved at the top like a humorless chess piece, with those lidded deathmask-eyes. Even one of those mosaics where everyone looks like earthenware and has robes—yes I am saying I would even look at Byzantine art at this point. I don’t want to be presumptuous, in these desperate days, where push and shove have come together. When people are dying. When all-else did fail. But... if I am allowed requests: Something all-yellow would be nice. Like a nice Yayoi-Kusama-yellow. To put that cartoon-light up against the paleness of the real sun and sunlight. A lemony-candy-colored thing to see would be nice. If you could. A St. George painting from the Middle Ages or northern Renaissance, with a real slippery-looking dragon, darker and more detailed than the rest of the picture. I like to look at St. George’s face as he slays it, and contemplate his expression. I’ve always liked that. Princess optional. Something very mechanical, where I can see the little parts. They don’t have to move. Something involving lots of details or angles from which to view it—where you have to look at it for a long time to feel sure you took it all in. If possible I would like to avoid anything that looked or felt chalky or featured a newspaper photo with some clear or blurry newsprint text. I think each newspapery or chalky thing would count as an anti-thing which needed a new extra good thing to counterbalance it. But I’m not entirely sure, at this point, that I’d need to see anything good there at all. Just: a lot. Or, okay, even, just five things. Five things in a bad courtyard would be okay. I just want to lie there, somewhere, listening to the sky noise in a forgettable mid-day (maybe hear the overhead crackle of a passenger jet once in a while), someplace that might tolerably be described as “far away” from familiar places, feeling my nerves un-knot and open out into awareness of the knowledge that I am surrounded by persistent, physical human endeavors, undertaken by other, now-absent lone consciousnesses who had the intent of inventing for the world something not broadcasting 24-7 that I needed them or they needed me. I wouldn’t need more than half an hour, I don’t think. Just to bathe in the luxury of being not-quite-alone but still not messaged-at. I’m afraid liking art is a little selfish: to want to be in the presence of the content of the human without the pressing need and mutual obligation the presence of the real human must imply. Just for a bit. It’s been so long. Just give me the minimum. A cafeteria roll, an overpriced flask of vitamin water, some other distant and ostensible art lover with a leather bracelet going “Hmm!” and nodding at their partner or spouse. A guard or dealer who can only look as if they are stoically suppressing physical pain at the sight of having to allow non-collectors near the work. A bored desk assistant in a custom-built pressure-treated wood cubicle whose surveilling head conceals plans about after-work drinking, lazily generous takes on this month’s Things, or both. Just one more time before I die I want to just be near something that was arguably trying, near objects unnecessary and at least semi-mysterious.

Ken Marchionno

300-Miles to Wounded Knee, the Oomaka Tokatakiya, Future Generations Ride

January 23 – May 9, 2021 Additional Solo Projects By:

Eileen Cowin Amir Zaki

And Artwork From MOAH’s Permanent Collection

@LANCASTERMOAH

@MOAHLANCASTER

Lancastermoah.org | 661-723-6250 | 665 W. Lancaster BLVD, Lancaster, CA 93534 IMAGE CREDIT: SHINSAKU IZUMI, JAPAN, ACTIVE UNITED STATES, 1880-1941, TUNNEL OF NIGHT, GELATIN SILVER PRINT, LOS ANGELES COUNTY FUND, COURTESY OF THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART

The Art World Gets Woke, Part II BY STEPHEN J. GOLDBERG, ESQ.

A R T

B R I E F

Philip Guston, The Studio (1969) ©The Estate of Philip Guston.

In last issue’s column I discussed the influence of the Woke movement in shaking up stodgy art museums to diversify their staff and fill gaps in their collections caused by decades of turning a blind eye to artwork made by minorities and women. Sure enough, a backlash emerged causing chaos to engulf the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), which had one of the broadest diversity plans. Additional controversy erupted around the postponement of the Philip Guston retrospective that planned to spotlight his Ku Klux Klan parody artworks. Last spring’s Black Lives Matter movement lit a fire under museum directors and boards of trustees in several cities, with The Met, the Guggenheim and SFMoMA announcing diversity programs. On November 23, The New York Times reported that The Met was appointing its first diversity officer in its long history—but only after a letter from the staff asked that the board recognize that the museum had “a deeply rooted logic of white supremacy and culture of systemic racism at our institution.” The City of New York also put pressure on The Met to diversify or lose public funding. The Met said it was setting aside $10 million to diversify its collection—a pittance, considering its large endowment. The BMA’s art collection does not adequately reflect the contributions of minority and female artists to America’s art history—that Baltimore is 68% Black made these omissions even more egregious. BMA’s courageous director, Christopher Bedford, began diversifying its collection in 2018 by selling seven artworks to purchase works by minority artists and women. However, the museum’s October 2020 announcement that it intended to sell major works by Clyfford Still, Brice Marden and Andy Warhol’s important Last Supper (1986) at Sotheby’s November contemporary art auction brought howls of protest from the art establishment. Los Angeles Times’ art critic Christopher Knight, who has persistently opposed sales of works by museums to diversify collections, called BMA “the leading poster child for art collection carelessness.” In local reaction, a number of former BMA trustees wrote a joint letter to Maryland’s attorney general demanding the sale be stopped, and two former board chairmen said they were withdrawing pledges totaling $50 million. In addition, two artist members of the board of trustees who are Black—Amy Sherald and Adam Pendleton—resigned amidst the turmoil. Bedford announced that the sale of the three works would generate enough funds for BMA to offer free admission, pay staff higher wages and enable diversity and inclusion programs. BMA admitted that it had adequate funds to cover operations; therefore, the museum was violating Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) rules. The AAMD contacted the board and Bedford to object. As a result, BMA agreed to pull the three works just hours before the Sotheby’s auction was to take place. Bedford vowed that, nevertheless, his diversity initiatives would continue. Meanwhile, another major controversy embroiled four art museums: the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.; London’s Tate Modern; and the Museums of Fine Arts of Boston and of Houston. The show, “Philip Guston Now” was supposed to open at the National Gallery in June, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, and travel to the other venues. Philip Guston was an important abstract expressionist of the 1960s, who invented a unique style—self-caricatures accompanied by a personal lexicon composed of shoes, cigars and various household items—creating a mordant portrayal of his everyday existence. The controversy concerned the museums’ intention to display a series of 24 paintings from the early ‘70s depicting hooded Klansmen as cartoon characters riding in convertibles, smoking cigars or walking through city streets in broad daylight—the banality of evil. Guston, who was a leftist concerned with civil rights, was clearly poking fun at the KKK. However, the museums were fearful that the KKK paintings would be misconstrued and chickened out—postponing the show until 2024 (after blowback, including an open letter signed by dozens of artists, many of them Black, the museums agreed to curtail the postponement to 2022). Many among the art cognoscenti wanted the show to go on, but the museums and their sponsors said that the Guston show needed to be “contextualized.” The museum establishment overreacted, sending a condescending message that its patrons are not perceptive enough to handle a parody ridiculing the KKK, and demonstrating that wokeness can sometimes go too far.

*For more informa tion, please visit www.murmurs.la/ Mission-Statemen t-Plan-of-Action

• •

BIPOC VOICES VI. DONATIONS III. AMPLIFY FINANCIAL ACTION AID DIRECT MUTUAL SPACE V. II. ORGANIZE OFFER OUR

Murmurs exists to challenge what is expected of an arts space by providing a n ew model of a multifaceted platform for strengthenin g community solid arity and building con sciousness in ord er to transform re ality.

I. IV.

BIPOC VOICES VI. DONATIONS III. AMPLIFY FINANCIAL ACTION AID DIRECT MUTUAL SPACE V. II.

We focus on supp orting art that resists commodification— in stallations, performances, videos, and happenings. Murmurs champion s those voices that have been system ically displaced, both historically and currently. This me ans centering BI POC, queer, tran s, and artists with disa bilities and alwa ys compensating those artists for thei r labor. This al so means centerin g the different philoso phical inquiries an d perspectives that exist throughout the socioeconomi c spectrum.

I. IV.

ORGANIZE OFFER OUR

The mission of is to present an alternative mo del of an arts spac e that exists outs ide the binary of muse ums/galleries and strives to disman tle the racist capital ist paradigm that the conventional art world has evolve d from.

CURRENTLY ON VIEW: BRI WILLIAMS “THE GHOST IN ME” UPCOMING SPRING EXHIBITION: SULA BERMÚDEZ-SILVERMAN 1411 NEWTON ST. LA, CA | @MURMURS.LA | @CAFEMURMURS | INFO@MURMURS.LA MURMURS.LA | CAFEMURMURS.COM

L A R A

J O

R E G A N ’ S

S I G H T S

U N S C E N E

Receptionist at Gagosian Gallery Using Covid Temperature Gun on Visitor, Beverly Hills, CA, 2020.

ANN MARIE ROUSSEAU

Spiraling Gold, acrylic on wood panel with resin, 44 x 44 inches

southern california art projects + exhibitions

2859 E. Coast Highway, Corona Del Mar, CA 92625 info@scapesite.com www.scapesite.com 949-723-3406

“GOT A LIGHT?” On Math Bass BY WILLIAM J. SIMMONS

If one wanted to be very art historical about it, Math Bass’ work resembles Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers (1875) with its beautiful detritus and bones and dust and longing bodies and skin-as-paintas-floor and new life emerging from every crevice. The predecessor for both Bass and Caillebotte might be the darkly excessive and comical “unswept floor” mosaics by the Ancients, paintings of castaway fruit and bones to prove that you were rich enough to eat heartily. Yet the art historical always seems smug, paranoid, dissecting and penetrating in a non-consensual way. Art history relies on reductive biomorphism and it relies on an identity politics that has no room to dream, no lustful orifices that spew forth heretofore unimagined, tentacled shapes. Art history aims to fill all holes when those holes might prefer to remain agape or to be filled only with fluids and gasses. Art history hates bottoms. One night, late one night, late, before dreaming, Math and I talked about Twin Peaks: The Return on the phone. We were both sad and queer that night, I think, queer and sad, queerly sad and sadly queer. For good reason and for reasons unknown, queers get sad pretty easily. I always think of Math now when I cruise through the curves and bumps of Mulholland Drive (the street) or Mulholland Drive (the film). My interactions with Bass always remind me that art is a necessary and reckless and activist and nostalgic and reclusive and spectacular and blithe and mysterious and denuded state of free association through the hills and valleys, lit only at times by brake lights and far-off lighthouses and swiftly tilting planets. On that night, I told Math that they needed to watch episode eight of Twin Peaks: The Return, which features a monster in the form of a lumberjack or logger or some other manly profession. The monster always has a cigarette in his mouth and, before he crushes your skull, fists you even, he

Newz!, 2020, 50 x 66 in., courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.

asks menacingly, “Got a light?” That there is an iconographic association here in that Math’s paintings sometimes involve smoke and cigarettes (and that every queer in LA, myself included, is air-quotes “quitting smoking”) is less important than the fact that with each cigarette, with each request for a light, there is still more detritus, still more floors to be swept by beautiful monochromatic housewives. Ash is blown into the wind or accidentally mashed onto a finger or intentionally driven into flesh. The butts that once housed said ash are wet and dry and featureless and painted like whores. The environmental toll these castaways have notwithstanding, we could more optimistically understand them as traces, as markers of touch or closeness or distance, as the paused, disintegrating frame between life and death. The trace and its concomitant longing are indicators of proximity. The smoking man in Twin Peaks: The Return begins far away. He infects the nondescript town via radio signals. Then he comes closer, as a monstrous amphibian that enters the mouth of an All-American girl while she sleeps. Sweeping may indeed be a part of her chores, and who knows if that will get done in the morning? It is a quaint rape like so many others we have seen before onscreen or on canvas. The smoking man’s desire for a cigarette is not just a non sequitur or a way to convince others that he is just a normal guy. It is an earnest need for connection (nobody does manage to produce that archetypal light, and that must be so sad). It is also a means of further spreading the leftovers, the ash of whatever evil drives him, burns him. Sympathy for monsters is a passé hallmark of modernism, yet it remains the quintessential way to relieve ourselves from the fear of being fundamentally anti-relational, or even evil. Yet sympathy or empathy for the destructive thing or body are not the same as proximity. In Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, the impending end of mankind (via the ultimate end of proximity—the apocalyptic disintegration of Earth itself) is a source of fear for some and the only source of life for others. Surrounded by Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Earth and Melancholia

swing past each other and loop back, getting closer and closer, just like the erotic anti-climax of the “Liebestod,”which throbs and throbs frustratingly until the very last second, until the very last drop of pigment or fascist cum. As Leo Bersani argues, the planets in Melancholia, not unlike Bass’ similarly cosmic Wizard-of-Oz-tornado of creatures and objects, become metaphors for the receptivity constantly being negotiated in the psychosexual sphere. What he means to say, I think, is that we are all, even the earth itself, bottoms at heart. We long to be the eye/hole of the storm, to be inside the cyclical conclusion of “Liebestod” or to take the vengeful and kind planet inside us so that we might expand to the point of exploding and producing a cloud of smoke, or we take our phallic cigarettes and ask that they be lit so that we might take pleasure in watching the flame engulf them, because we wish to do the engulfing; to be the generative void that pleasurably gobbles up everything, crushes things, creates fissures, bleeds, and places unexpected things next to each other or inside each other. A strained, stretched, widening, loosened metaphor, one that gives lights and receives them, might be the best way to describe Math Bass’ work. Yet metaphor is an easy interpretational mode that relies too heavily on iconography. Morever, description logo-centrically implies that all that is felt can be written or painted, that you actually can describe what bottoming is like to someone who has yet to do it. A simile might be better. In this moment, it seems more capacious. Bass’ work is like a ride on the Long Island Rail Road, winding through a certain kind of world, in which crushed skulls and young love happen simultaneously and often unnoticed, where aspiration and reality meet, where the Piano Man’s jar is filled up with cock-like bread, where hearts are broken and lose their three-dimensionality, only to unflatten at the sight of beautiful arms at work on a floor. And then, eventually, you reach the lighthouse, where the water crashes up against the shore, and there you lie, naked, hoping the droning illumination will project you into yet another narrow strip of land filled with memories.

Newz!, 2019, diptych, each 52 x 50 in., 52 x 104 in. overall dimension, courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.

Los Angeles

Advanced Degrees in Architecture

sciarc.edu

Priority deadline:

January 15

VELVET REVOLUTION Yasmine Nasser Diaz Seeks Reprieve in Gentler Avenues of Influence BY JULIE SCHULTE

In visiting Yasmine Nasser Diaz’ show, “soft powers” at Ochi Projects, I had the rich pleasure of speaking with the artist about her process, intimate spaces and how soft powers are not only a cause for hope, but are—and always have been—a female superpower. “Soft powers” is a breathtaking series of fiber etchings on velvet-patterned jewel tones, resplendent pearls, and ebonies—the images sourced from Diaz’ personal archive and collected from YemeniAmerican girls she knew in her native Chicago. Diaz works with the images manipulating silkscreen stencils and then employs a burnout technique where the mixed-fiber material undergoes a chemical process to dissolve the cellulose fibers, revealing a semi-transparent pattern against the more solidly woven fabric. Burnout fabric—fashionable in the ‘90s—dates back to 19th-century France in Lyon, and served then as a less expensive, but still opulent, alternative to lace. Diaz explained that its proper name, devoré, is rooted in the French verb dévorer: to devour. As she detailed the intricate work of shaving tiny bits of velvet to trace the photographs, I felt the acute satisfaction found in redirecting destructive forces as an avenue toward beauty and preservation. Each work in “soft powers” is mysterious and alluring in its own right, offering the same pleasure in discovery one experiences thumbing through antique film negatives at a flea market. With the facial features scraped away and blanched out, the viewer seeks not to identify who the figure is, but what she is doing. The nature of the burnout velvet allows Diaz to favor outlines and shadows so that we are drawn toward the position of a girl’s hands resting on her lap, or the way she holds her best friend around the waist. If in the original photograph their cheeks were pressed together as they embraced, in the etching, their cheeks now appear to merge—the devoré fabric allowing sisterly care to look how it feels. Silkscreen stencils can conjure references to guerrilla art and punk rock, yet the use of velvet in the chosen color palette gives Diaz’ work an anachronistic charge. Burnout was not only popular in the ‘90s dELiA*s catalog, but used in dir’oo—a style of dress worn by engaged and married Yemeni women. Diaz explained that her mother was drawn to these shades in rich plums and burgundies, despite their colors not being traditionally found in Yemen; the jewel-toned palette speaks to hybrid culture in Diaz’ neighborhood, a mix of Sawana and Yemeni people. Although the shades undermine Yemeni authenticity, they clue us into the dynamism of third-culture identity. According to Diaz, “soft powers’” premise of “attraction rather than coercion”—is something innate to feminity. The term encompasses the cultural code-switching familiar to children of immigrant parents; it is never articulated that this is what you do, but is born from watching closely those around you. When Diaz stressed to me the importance of showing girls existing in their own spaces; that beClockwise from opposite page: Upstairs (At Sumaya’s), 2020; On Hold, 2020; Say No To Drugs, 2020; all courtesy of Ochi Projects.

ing in each other’s rooms afforded a retreat from the feeling of being hyper-surveilled and judged by family and the world, I realized it would be a misreading of her work to see these rooms as spaces of confinement; these are spaces where multiple identities can coexist and flourish. In these teen spaces, now nostalgic, where our friends felt like magical beings who might usher us into our next iteration, where the objects inside are imbued with emotion and experience, watching is reimagined. Close-looking occurs not to monitor and control the girls, but to delight in and celebrate them—girls look to each other and wonder at how she dresses, how she wears her hair, what tape is playing in the boom box. I told Diaz I felt she beautifully honored the “girl gaze”—the gawking impulse to admire, adore and document: Didn’t we all have an older girl who was a demigod to us? Who taught us how to dance? Who we’d mimic to the point of embarrassment? Diaz smiled and drew my attention to a tiny poster of the indie band Sebadoh in one of the works, explaining, “I kept that in the image because my sister was obsessed with them, and so, of course, I was too.” Diaz’ etchings were born out of her collage practice; what began with wanting to incorporate fabric onto the collages soon became working entirely with the textile. While the allure of collage is in the snipping away of images to serve a precise Graduation Day, 2020, courtesy of Ochi Projects.

and controlled impression, burnout is fussy and unpredictable. Once she’s begun the chemical process, she must work quickly, and despite her intention and precision with stenciling, “when I begin etching, I realize the velvet will do what the velvet wants to do,” she said. In my favorite piece in the show, three young women pose together for the camera. By the tilt of their heads, we know they are playful. Their bodies merge like a mountain range, the particulars of each arm trailing off, melting like amber. According to Diaz, the velvet did what it wanted, and she was pleasantly surprised with how it evolved. As we moved through the show, Yasmine would hold up her phone, using the flashlight function to illuminate the pieces. She was gracious and inviting, and when I looked where she did, the background textile would sparkle through the velvet that had been scraped away: a girl’s peasant blouse was now flecked with gold dust, a curlicue of a landline snaking down a breastbone appeared 3D, taking on the sensual pleasure of a shadow box. In trusting that the velvet will do what it will do, in going towards the spaces and women she loved, Yasmine Nasser Diaz offers us a retreat to a space where watching is not about surveillance, but about care, where we can be invited into feminine space and leave astonished.

Pam Douglas

SANCTUARY PARTS 1, 2, and 3 PamDouglasArt.com

Jan. 19 to Feb. 13, 2021 5458 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles 90036 323.297.3061 taggallery.net

THE WORLD NEEDS DYNASTY HANDBAG A Voice of Unreason for Uncertain Times BY TAYLOR DORAN

I sat down recently to chat with comedian, performer and artist Jibz Cameron over Zoom about—what else?—making art during a pandemic. Cameron’s stage persona and alter ego, Dynasty Handbag, has been giving vaudevillian performances that fly in the face of social boundaries and etiquette for over 15 years. In the Before Time, she hosted a monthly Weirdo Night at Zebulon in Los Angeles. The variety show brought together disparate performers and comedians, all of them—you guessed it—Weirdos. Dynasty Handbag, resplendent in neon spandex and smeared lipstick, is the steady but irreverent leader of the weirdos. She comes on between acts to make fun of each of the performers. “I tie [each act] together, conceptually—in the wrong way. If something’s like, really heavy, I’ll come in, and I’ll be able to get everything on track again,” Cameron tells me. But of course, 2020 flew at everyone, and Dynasty Handbag was no exception. She was only able to host one live Weirdo Night this year, in February. “Honestly, my pandemic fatigue started right away,” she says. “I went to the black hole immediately. I was really stressed about how I was going to make anyAbove: Smiling Beth at Weirdo Night; Opposite page: Dynasty Handbag, photo by Indra Dunis.

thing happen... I was very depressed because all the things I had been working towards were just canceled. I’m generally a pretty high-spirited person, except for when I’m not,” she laughs. “But I was a little bit shocked at how bleak my outlook was. Part of that was because it was just at the very apex of a bunch of big things that were happening for me.” Not only did the pandemic take away Weirdo Night, it also hit Cameron at a high point in her work. March’s Weirdo Night had already been canceled because she was shooting her TV show Garbage Castle, which was picked up to air on FX. “We made the pilot, and it was great. Dynasty Handbag lives in a one-room SRO on top of a pile of trash. This dandy possum lives in the garbage bin in there… and Maria Bamford is in it. She’s the hippie landlord,” Cameron tells me. “They ordered four episodes. So, me and my writing partner, Amanda Verwey, went and wrote four scripts. We turned them in on a Friday and then the lockdown happened the next Monday. And we haven’t heard anything since. Not a peep.” I don’t know that I have ever heard a more attractive pitch for a show. “It’s so good, if I do say so myself,” Cameron agrees

Video still of Garbage Castle, 2020.

excitedly. “We had this, like, Henson puppeteer [playing the dandy possum]… she came in and did her puppeting on set like a total fucking pro. We made this pilot, and they liked it a lot. It was super exciting that we sold it! Cuz, Dynasty Handbag is a hard sell. You know, you would think the world would be ready.” I do think the world would be ready, especially in 2020. But apparently not. Nevertheless, Cameron hasn’t stopped working. She produced a virtual Weirdo Night, which is available to rent on Vimeo. “A lot of people I knew were really scrambling to make content and livestream,” she says. “People really needed to connect that way, and I definitely watched stuff that way. But I did not feel like jumping into that vortex.” After enduring months of the pandemic, in June or July, she started envisioning what the ideal way of continuing the performance series might be. “And lo and behold, with my lesbian spells,” she smiles, “in late July, [Zebulon] got in touch with me. They love Weirdo Night and are really supportive of me. They wanted to do it right. It was a four-camera shoot, and ultimately kind of a film. It was really fun. And, such a relief to talk to artists again.” How was it transitioning a performance meant for a live audience to video? “It’s really easy to be activated [when there’s a live audience],” she says. “So when I went out to do my opening monologue, I thought of it as kind of a late-night talk show. And man, I was stiff as a board, cause I had NO energy coming back at me. It took me a while for the gears to get going. And then I

just performed for the camera people. There were entities there!” What’s next for Dynasty Handbag? “I have no idea,” she sighs. She has made another live show to be performed in 2021, complete with live animation and a choose-your-own-adventure ending. “It’s based on the Titanic. You know, a giant, luxurious, gluttonous ship headed to destruction. It was topical when I came up with it two years ago, and now it just keeps piling on. Like, titans of industry, climate disaster, there’s material for days, you know?” I do know. “The main character is like Jack, but it’s a kind of nongendered octopus that’s escaping the warming waters and disguises itself as a giant lady’s hat. And then the Rose character is like… I haven’t quite figured out yet, actually. She’s either a cunty spoiled rich girl from the Upper East Side or she’s like a dowdy, I’m-never-going-to-be-married heiress who is the shame of her parents. And she finds this queer romance with this octopus.” And with the live animation? “It’s going to be wild. The sex scene is really good, because [the octopus] has eight arms and is doing all this work!” The world needs Dynasty Handbag—the voice of unreason tying things together in our uncertain times. Otherwise, where are all the weirdos supposed to go? Zoom glitches, and Cameron’s last few words run through several digital octaves. “Great glitch right at the end!” I say. “Well,” she says, holding a tiny banana up to her ear, “I got another call coming in, that’s why.”

Dynasty Handbag, I Hate This Place

34 34

RECKONING Joel Garcia, Monument Lab and Social Justice BY CLAYTON CAMPBELL

Joel Garcia was actively involved in the movement to remove the statue of Christopher Columbus from LA’s Grand Park in 2018, and this year he was a key mover in the actions that resulted in the toppling of the Statue of Junipero Serra in downtown Los Angeles. Garcia is an indigenous artist, activist and cultural worker whose practice intersects with the national movement to remove monuments that reflect the racist history of the United States. In 2019 he was a Fellow in Monument Lab’s “Shaping the Past,” a transnational exchange project. Monument Lab is a public art and history studio based in Philadelphia, and it recently received a $4 million grant from the $250 million Mellon Foundation Monuments Project. This grant will support an audit of the nation’s monuments plus the opening of ten Monument Lab field research offices, including one that may come to Los Angeles next year. Monument Lab defines a monument as simply “a statement of power and presence in public.” Often our existing monuments make powerful statements that are negative and hurtful

to groups of people who have been oppressed. In the conversation about monuments, some advocate their total removal. Others would let them stay, but contextualized with signage that educates what the entire history is. How you view this debate depends perhaps on how you see our nation’s history: as fluid or fixed, evolving or conserving what we know. Critical to revising history is how to build an accountable and honest relationship to the past and include truthful, inclusive narratives for the present. Not everyone is happy, however. The Catholic Church has said the toppling of Serra statues throughout California showed that “evil has made itself present here.” Archbishop Cordileone of San Francisco decried the “mob rule” that led to the Serra statues being “mindlessly defaced and toppled by a small, violent mob.” I wondered if the Catholic Church could become a progressive force in retelling the history of California? I asked Garcia about his activist art practice, his recent actions toppling the Father Junipero Serra statue, and how the Catholic Church has pushed back. Garcia said, “Initially, the Archdiocese was pressuring the

Opposite page and top of this page: June 20th (Summer Solstice) toppling of the Serra statue at Olvera. Seconds later, youth claim the statue and the pedestal, begin covering it with flowers, fruits, and other items and reclaim the space. Above: September 22 (Fall Equinox) members of the First Peoples community of Los Angeles repurposed the site and pedestal where the Serra statue stood and converted it into a site of ceremony and reclamation using prayer flags. These same ribbons were also used to obscure the plaques recounting the inaccurate history of Los Angeles.

Mayor to reinstall the toppled statue, then it was trying to get the city to gift it to them. Rather than seek dialogue they’ve dug in and remain committed to their own narrative. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has proven over and over that it can’t be trusted, and because they do have a small constituency of members that are indigenous to California, they act as if this is an out for them.” Once the monument comes down, what happens next? Is removal more than a symbolic gesture? Is an empty pedestal more powerful after the act of removal? Can it be a site for reconciliation? In Garcia’s view, “Until the land is returned to the First Peoples of Los Angeles, it will be a contested site. At the moment there are efforts to ensure that there is an accurate and equitable representation at El Pueblo Monument aka Placita Olvera. For the moment, that empty pedestal does resonate in a bigger way than removing it outright. As with the Columbus Statue, it is important that the city remove that in partnership with the indigenous community of Los Angeles and dedicate resources to authentically represent what has happened here in LA.

For the time being, the community—those that were there during the toppling and others—has started to use that park more consistently with relation to issues concerning native/indigenous folks. It is good to also see that the management team of El Pueblo Monument also desires an accurate narrative of LA’s history and more equitable resources to make that possible. So by removing the statue it has opened up space for more constructive dialogue with the city, but it needs to be consistent and it can’t always be if the community needs to topple something in order to be heard.” As the broad movement to revise our received histories gathers momentum and new allies, I considered systemic change. How, for example, do you change the narrative in K–12 education about something like the Mission history in California? Can new monuments jumpstart this process? Garcia was completely affirmative in feeling that new monuments and memorials can influence and begin to turn around school curriculum. In the coming days and years, perhaps the responsibility to speak truth to power is more important than ever before, and begins with our artists.

This page and opposite: Installation views: Los Angeles Poverty Department’s “State of Incarceration,” 2010, The Box, Los Angeles. (Images courtesy of The Box gallery email newsletter)

The LA Poverty Department and The Box Gallery Finding a Place (for art) in Skid Row BY KELLY RAPPLEYE

The Skid Row neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles remains emblematic of the city’s ongoing epidemic of housing deprivation. More than 66,400 people were estimated to wake up each morning without stable housing in LA County as of LA Homeless Services Authority’s annual January count—even before the disastrous economic effects of COVID. While city officials call this recent wave a crisis, Angelenos are beginning to wonder if homelessness should be considered endemic to the core functioning of the city, rather than a recent anomaly. The glaring disparity in conditions of life for LA’s wealthy property owners and its impoverished, unhoused residents has been a recurring and increasing “crisis” since the 1980s. In fact, Skid Row has been a focal political flashpoint since the 1930s and remains the site of recurring experiments in urban planning. Yet, such attempts to target or contain city municipal services and social services have failed to provide the most essential need to the working class—housing. Bordering Skid Row is LA’s acclaimed Arts District, where a period of extreme gentrification ushered in upscale venues, thriving breweries, an influx of wealthy, loft-dwelling homeowners and skyrocketing rents, along with 12 leading commercial art galleries. The convergence of urban gentrification, art production, and LA’s “homeless crisis” in this area starkly illuminates the paradoxes of contemporary art, where radical artistic content is beset by the extractive gallery system. Cashing in on the cultural

capital of the “art world” has been integral to developer and real-estate interests that have completely transformed Downtown LA, and brought immense pressure and heightened policing to Skid Row’s unhoused residents. I spoke with an Arts’ District mainstay, The Box gallery, and a Skid Row performing arts organization, the Los Angeles Poverty Department (also known by its cheeky acronym LAPD), to understand how an art space can bring its unhoused neighbors into the gallery space, physically and virtually. Since 1986, LAPD has amplified the voices of Skid Row residents through performances and public art projects that form a counternarrative to the handwringing tragedy-porn espoused by liberals and right-wingers alike about Skid Row and its inhabitants. LAPD’s founder John Malpede was one of the first performance artists to work primarily with homeless actors, writers and participants. The mission is simple, yet profound: to share the concerns, needs, dreams and stories of Skid Row community members, in their own words. The supportive and experimental relationship between LA Poverty Department and The Box’s founder and curator Mara McCarthy began in 2008 with the “Skid Row History Museum” exhibition at The Box’s former Chinatown location a few miles north of Skid Row, which hosted a flurry of participatory events, performances and musical acts, alongside an exhibition of archival material on Skid Row’s largely untold community history.

Los Angeles Poverty Department, “Walk the Talk” parade/performance. Photographer KCRW’s Avishay Artsy, 2012. Images courtesy of LAPD, (Images courtesy of The Box gallery email newsletter)

LAPD’s Associate Director Henriette Brouwers fondly remembered the lively crowds when Skid Row came to The Box, with people hanging out of the windows for live performances, and crowds from all walks of life sharing a recognition of Skid Row beyond the dire conditions of American poverty. This vibrant exhibition demonstrated to Brouwers and Malpede the importance of having a physical art space to gather and exchange knowledge and care within the community, for the community. They went on to create this space in 2015, opening the Skid Row History Museum & Archive, now located at 250 South Broadway. The space hosts performances, exhibitions and the Skid Row History archives, along with numerous ongoing community-led artistic and archival projects. Over LA’s lockdown summer of 2020, McCarthy saw an opportunity to highlight her gallery’s history with the LA Poverty Department through a digital campaign for gallery audiences stuck at home. The Box’s email newsletter series shared images and material from the 2010 “State of Incarceration” exhibition and performance series with LAPD that focused on the urgent issue of California’s prison overcrowding. The exhibition filled The Box with large, steel prison beds (paid for by the CBS soap opera, The Bold and the Beautiful in a quintessentially LA moment), where LAPD actors sat and rehearsed scripts developed from their lived experiences in prison. Brouwers recalled the unique interchange that occurred when gallery attendees, unlike the usual theater patrons, observed quietly and patiently. This allowed for a generative silence to develop as they occupied the prison beds together, mimicking the long silences and boredom of life on the “inside”, in a profound moment of non-theatrical performance. The exploratory projects between The Box gallery and LAPD provide a poignant example of how art spaces can create mean-

ing with their communities. McCarthy reflected on her motivations to defy the social enclosures of the commercial art world by opening her space as a resource to LAPD, in the simple acknowledgment that the Arts District and Skid Row are part of the same Downtown community and need to learn how to act accordingly, and respect each other as neighbors. Throughout June and July, @theboxla celebrated the LAPD’s newly digitized “Walk the Talk” Archive, with short video excerpts from the archive’s nearly 70 hours of interviews with local heroes, activists and important figures who lived, worked and sometimes experienced homelessness in the Skid Row community since the 1980s. LAPD’s “Walk the Talk” began in 2008 with plans to create a Skid Row Walk of Fame to publicly hail unsung community leaders of Skid Row, complete with sidewalk plaquestars mirroring the Hollywood Walk of Fame. They gathered the life stories of chosen local icons from transcribed interviews, which later provided scripts for a series of public performances. Years of bureaucratic barriers evolved the sidewalk project into a bi-annual “Walk the Talk” neighborhood march, inaugurated in 2012 with three days of boisterous marchers filling the streets of Downtown and Skid Row, performing these narratives. The digitization of this archive was finally completed this year by software designer Rob Ochshorn, providing an invaluable resource for a people’s history of Skid Row. The archival interviews capture the ingenuity, grit, and unfathomable strength of daily survival on the streets of Los Angeles, along with the truly affecting grace and wisdom of its dwellers. The “Walk the Talk” digital archive interview series can be found on the LAPD website (lapovertydept.org) and @LApovertydepartment, and video highlights remain on The Box gallery’s Instagram, @theboxla.

MOLLY SEGAL Marrow Sucker Feb 6-Apr 3, 2021

Luna Anaïs Gallery www.lunaanais.com @lunaanaisgallery 323-474-9319

Borderline Curated by

Behind the Mask

Gazelle Samizay, still from My Shadow

Skount Garcia, Transformation and Evolution

Curated by Sarah Umles

Mahsa Farhadikia, Mandy Palasik, Brandi Sjostrom, Naomi Stewart

Virtual Exhibitions Opening January 22, 2021 angelsgateart.org

John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres

The Bronx Comes to LA January 2021 John Ahearn Monxo BX Acrylic on plaster 26 x 22.5 x 8.5 inches 2017

Visit MOLAA en Casa online to participate in our online programming. - Online tours of OaxaCalifornia, Arpilleras and more exhibitions will be added - Afro-Latinx Festival presented by The Port of Long Beach: February 15 - 28, 2021.

www.molaa.org

featuring guest artists: Linda Vallejo, Rafa Esparza, and Marta Minujín.. Visit our channel to view our archived MOLAA en Casa sessions.

628 Alamitos Avenue, Long Beach California 90802 562.437.1689

Hold on Tight Eve Wood December 2, 2020 to January 21, 2021 Available to view online at https://www.riohondo.edu/arts/ hold-on-tight/.

Rio Hondo College Virtual Gallery www.riohondo.edu

Hold on Tight, 2015

2021. Bold. New.

taggallery.net • 323.297.3061 • @taggallery 5458 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036

PH OTO

James Welling’s “Choreograph” BY COLIN WESTERBECK

I got to know James Welling over a decade ago when he invited me to teach a graduate seminar in the history of photography at UCLA’s Broad School of the Arts, where he was the director of the photography program. His own photography was a mystery to me then, as it still is today. I don’t mean that I was confused by his work or had reservations about it. On the contrary, I was dazzled by the intelligence and originality of the art he was producing in a medium so often undermined by its commercial and reportorial uses. A new book of his just published this year, titled Choreograph, is devoted to a single project done over the last six years. The image you see here is from this latest project of Welling’s. The image is at first, characteristically, confusing. Welling doesn’t condescend to the viewer by making images easily understood. The composition is blocked out in a woosh of colors—soaring buildings that are orange, a garden in the bleak white of winter. In center stage, two dancers dissolve into a motion blur performing a Merce Cunningham “Event” Welling photographed in 2015. Welling’s goal is not to confuse us but to hold our attention in this medium we are used to understanding at a glimpse. The series is titled “Choreograph” because dancers are the anchor of the imagery, the human subject to which our eye goes instinctively in any photograph. The placement of the dancers at the center of this image compels us to start there and work our way out to the edges. One way the visual arts can help viewers find their way in compound, complex compositions like this is through a kind of formalism, a reciprocity of shapes. In this image, the female dancer’s right leg looping up from her torso mimics the abstract iron shapes in green looping down toward her partner. Those iron curves anchor the image in the Chicago Loop neighborhood where this Calder sculpture is found. Welling begins each composition with a selection of photographs he has made and plans to combine into a new composition. Once he has decided on the composition, he reduces the parts to black and white and then begins adding color to various areas, isolating each with a monochrome channel in Photoshop. Compelled by the abrupt disconnections between subjects and backgrounds as well as one pure color and another, Welling’s compositions lodge in our minds the way the vivid imagery of a dream does. They puzzle us and compel close looking much as a dream compels memories when we awake. #4940, 2015, from Choreograph, 2020, courtesy of James Welling.

FAKE NUDES Alison Jackson’s “Truth is Dead” BY ANTHONY AUSGANG

O F F

T H E

WA L L

“Truth is Dead,” 2020, at NeueHouse Hollywood, photos by Alison Jackson.

Artists can make the invisible become visible, but that doesn’t mean they have to. Photographers in particular find it necessary to provide visual confirmation of a chosen moment; in the case of some Pulitzer Prize winners, their captured image has become the official record of an event. But what’s most important is the assumption, particularly in news photographs, that the information presented is authentic. Unfortunately, that trust has been sullied by the biggest Postmodern hat trick of all: fake news. Although ostensibly providing what she considers images necessary to parse current events, British photographer Alison Jackson seems more concerned with how to exploit a viewer’s fantasy concerning those events. For her NeueHouse exhibition, “Truth is Dead,” she photographed celebrity impersonators in farcical situations: doppelgängers of Lady Diana and other Royals are presented in unflattering poses, as is Donald Trump. But by the authority vested in her as an artist, she is somehow allowed and even praised for, as LA Times contributor Leah Ollman writes, “in the age of fake news ...making fakes that become news.” In the same LA Times interview, Jackson claims that, “people are still wanting to believe the image more than anything. It doesn’t matter ...that it’s not real.” Ignoring such an important distinction makes it easier for people to believe that Jackson’s photographs, although not legit documentation, still accurately represent events that happened. After all, people are primed for it, for although they may shout God Save the Queen as loud as the next bloke, they secretly want to see how Queen Elizabeth II looks when stripped of her inviolability. If it takes a staged photo by Jackson to reassure people that the Queen shits like everyone else, so be it. The question is, however, whether or not that really needs to be seen. In the art world, there is no sin greater than presenting a counterfeit work of art as one that is genuine; it’s an act that is legally considered criminal. But a work of art presenting a counterfeit event gets no such condemnation; in fact, grayheads will debate its finer qualities. This once again proves the disconnect between the art world and its secular equivalent, the world without art. Art is the only arena where something without usefulness becomes essential; plus, it’s a place where impersonators seem to represent what transpired far more accurately than the actual players. For all her black leather and vaunted no-bullshit approach, Jackson still delivers art in a weirdly boring traditional manner; that is, as expected. Jackson’s work is obviously created to play into the anticipations of Trump detractors, and there’s plenty to incite their rage. But while reality has limits, fiction does not; so maybe instead of presenting Trump doing what we already believe him to have done, Jackson could show Trump doing something completely unexpected: like working in a soup kitchen or helping an old lady across the street. Now that would really prove truth is dead.

R E VIE W S

Kader Attia Regen Projects By Christopher Michno

Kader Attia’s debut with Regen Projects —a selection of previously exhibited and new works—continues the French-Algerian artist’s critique of modernity as embodied by Western capitalism and the mechanisms and ideologies of colonialism. Attia has frequently examined the particularities of French-Algerian colonial history, while implicating global colonial structures writ large. “The Valley of Dreams” takes its point of departure from these conceptual grounds, with a series of three works installed in close proximity, in what is the most coherently developed portion of the show.Rochers Carrés (2007/2020), presented here as a lightbox, depicts two Algerian youths looking north across the Mediterranean from an Algerian breakwater. This is juxtaposed with the variously sized refrigerators of Untitled Skyline (2007), covered in a mosaic

of mirrored tiles, evoking the image of a gleaming modern city. Like the glittering nocturnal skyline of New York City, it reflects the dreams projected upon it.The Dead Sea (2016), an installation of clothing that spreads from a corner of the gallery, conveys the perils of crossing the Mediterranean in search of refuge and opportunity. Together, these three implicate the dream of migration, wherein the sea becomes a graveyard, and the remaining traces—the very clothing off migrants’ backs—collect on the shores of Europe. Attia asserts, without much elaboration through the objects presented here, an “analogy between California, New Mexico, Texas, and North Africa,” suggesting similarities of climate and patterns of migration and its attendant dangers, from which we may draw inferences regarding the cross-border disparities and analogies between sites of colonial and neocolonial relations. The remaining works in “The Valley of Dreams” (all dated 2020) reprise various aspects of Attia’s critique of colonialism and interest in the notion of repair. A series of Berber ceramic vessels, once shattered, now repaired with a brilliant blue epoxy—the color selected for its association with the Tuareg people—emphasizes Attia’s interest in the Japanese tradition of kintsugi—the repair of pottery while preserving the visible scar. This same blue pigment appears along the folds of kraft paper—discarded powdered milk packages delivered to North Africa by NGOs—that has been crumpled and spread out to resemble what might be a topographical map. Yet, Attia does not adequately address the context of Southern California or the neocolonial structures of the US The strength of postcolonial analysis derives from elaboration of the particularities of site, which Attia has done elsewhere—and here, in relation to North Africa and Europe. Though parallels from varied examples may be drawn—and the similarities between migration to Europe and the US are well observed—the lack of research on the specifics of this site makes this exhibition feel like an import. Kader Attia, Rochers Carrés (Square Rocks), 2008/2020. Courtesy Regen Projects.

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Rodney McMillian Vielmetter Los Angeles By Max King Cap

This exhibition is simply horrible: a catalog of horrors, a parade of barbarism made all the more wretched because we have become inured to atrocity, our attention spans irredeemably vaporous. It is both commonplace and theatrical, a fleetingly addictive entertainment. For this particular presentation, Rodney McMillian is our impresario of the Grand Guignol: he presents for all-comers. Most viewers will consider themselves informed after viewing such provocative work and refer to it conversationally, while others might nod. For a very small minority of patrons, however, the horror remains and resonates long after leaving the exhibition because, for them, it is a wound that never heals. McMillian has traditionally considered race in his varied works— abstraction, installation, video, sculpture—and those works are incisive and dolefully contemplative, but this exhibition, symptomatically titled “Body Politic,” is rawly unmediated. It seethes. There is revulsion, there is contempt, there is distrust, and nothing is held back. Many of the paintings include text— shakily lettered and slashed with color—and nonchalantly recite atrocities committed upon Black bodies. These are works of anger and disgust but it is the works done in all black— mute and imperious Rorschachs— recite that are most arresting and lastingly communicative. Cell I (2017–20) a crushed smoky butterfly, and Cell II (2018–20) a broken crystal, are dense matte black schematics that swallow light. They suggest both architectural plans of secret and forbidden locations; sites where inhuman actions are performed, and human biological cells, polygons of our very humanness laid out and schematized. It is in these suggestive fragments, both as visibly microscopic and structurally fabricated, that McMillian excavates the cornerstone of American history with an appetite for the ruination of Black bodies, minds, economies and futures. Similarly harrowing, but extruded and eerily present are Untitled (Heart) (2018-19), Untitled (Entrails) (2019–20 )and Black Dick (2017– 20), all configured of fabric, chicken wire and historical taint. Heart, a crumpled valve coarsely folded in upon itself, suggests not only a statistical report on racial disparities of life expectancy but the daily uptick in heart rate at the near-daily suspicions and discourtesies regularly encountered. Entrails is a snare, a serpent and long tether that harnesses and binds in employment, advancement and trust. Black Dick is a dehumanization, a fetishization, and with apologies to the BBC, a traditional lynching souvenir. There is a rage in this exhibition but few will become enraged by it. Only those very few, that small segment of the population for whom this exhibition is a historical ID card. And if you are of the mind that “You people should just get over it, that was so long ago” try remembering an earthen dam in Mississippi and three dead civil rights workers with upstanding citizens looking down at their murdered bodies, then recall a street in Minneapolis. Rodney McMillian, “cell II,” 2017–20. Courtesy of artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photo by Jeff Mclane.

Rachel Rosenthal Roberts Projects By John David O’Brien

While Rachel Rosenthal is best known for her performance work, the collage works on display in “Thanks: Collage Works from the 1970s,” with their aged surfaces and intersecting themes, reveal an artist whose force of sentiment is firmly grounded and luxuriously generous. Performed in an elaborate ritual where an audience was gathered and, one after another, selected members were given a lit taper and provided with a reason for the artist’s gratitude, “Thanks” restored an order that was up until then an open account. The collages are about relationships between the artist and others including family, they are reflections on her own life with its displacement and encounters and they are about working on a paper surface with the lines, gestures and mark-making derived from the moment of art that she was living. The collage, 5 Decades (1975), is both a birthday card to herself marking off 50 years as well as an enigma, possibly an attempt at crystal divination. A photo-based image of three women and a man standing for a portrait with golf clubs is split horizontally keeping their feet firmly resting at the bottom of the vertical sheet, while the four torsos and heads are at the top of the sheet. Above the heads, two upside-down five-pointed stars are drawn. In between is a tangle of linear elements looking like noodled threads with a red star in the center. On either side of this textured column are a series of carefully drawn and numbered minerals or rocks, almost as though they were specimens in a collection. While the narrative may not be immediately clear, the intimate and thoughtful delineation of the relationships with the images within is palpable, like a magic spell. In another work from the series, “MARA,” 1975, a faded and dated image of a woman is centered; around the outside of the extended rectangular page a garland of hair has been affixed. Within the bounds of the page, a flurry of crosshatched and smudged lines build up an atmosphere without ever coalescing into an image. Whoever the artist is portraying, it is clearly someone that inspires strong feelings. For anyone familiar with Rosenthal’s characteristically shaved head, the importance of hair is obvious, and the sacrifice of cutting and then offering it an important symbolic gesture. Rachel Rosenthal is best known for her work in performance and as a leading figure in the LA women’s art movement, but she has also worked in the visual arts, in animal rescue, and as a community organizer. “Thanks” providesviewers with a chance to look beyond her work as a performer and begin to see the breadth of her poetic reach.

Rachel Rosenthal, 5 Decades, 1975. Courtesy of Rachel Rosenthal Estate and Roberts Projects. Photo by Alan Shaffer.

Yolanda González Bermudez Projects By Genie Davis

With “Metamorphosis,” Southern California-based artist Yolanda González offers a haunting solo show of monochrome images powerful enough to overwhelm any technicolor image. Her original “Metamorphosis” series, an experimental series she began in 1995, was created after a residency program in Japan. This and a new series, “Metamorphosis II,” fuse the culture of Japan with her Chicana heritage. Her leaching of color from what could have been vibrant paintings coincided initially with the loss of her close friend Cella Coffin, and mirrors the stark personal darkness González herself experienced. The 2020 iteration was created to honor her late mother, Yolanda Lopez González, but also reflects the current pandemic. Like the images themselves—turning inward, expanding outward—González has said she found herself returning to the same emotional space as with the earlier death of a loved one. The intensity of this new series is somehow both bleak and inspirational. With their twisted, inverted, puzzle-like shapes, her paintings feel muscular, aching, explosive. They are vital and complex, riven with sorrow, and raw with hope and longing. The title of the series evokes the artist’s palette transformation from bright color to this barren yet beautiful black and white, as well as the transformation of the body from life to death, and the passage of the soul. González paints images that shiver and reach, transcend and reference; these are works that move the viewer into a dimension that is no longer physical but spiritual. One of the most compelling works here is Reaching for Sanity (1993). It depicts an outstretched hand, digits distended, palm open. But, as if the palm was being read, the fingers reveal themselves to contain three faces attached to one knotted body, two more strongly visible than the third, forming impressions of suffering or rest: a small but visceral moment in a life, or a multitude of moments within that life, during the ultimate rite of passage. González’ No is similarly structured: a pretzel of a body with four human heads, one of which is nearly featureless and dark, as if shrouded, and one which is bisected, Picasso-like, lips separate. There is also a simian-like head, which seems to embrace the other beings, a universal mother. There is a sense of the embryonic, of gestation, as well as overall transformation. In the artist’s piece No. 2, there is a clearly delineated dominant face on a body askew, shaped as if it were a floating cloud. This is a face awash in knowledge, in grief, in understanding. Behind it, a fainter image, more anguished; and a darkened oval. Body parts float and seem interchangeable – breast, arm, ears, and what may be a penis, from which the cloud shape itself seems to have emerged. Consisting of some 30 artworks in all, González’ “Metamorphosis” is an evolution into, through and out of darkness, offering the perfect, swirling, broken, all-knowing face of change and passage for the current, still-pandemic world.

Yolanda González, Reaching for Sanity, 2020. Courtesy Bermmudez Projects.

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RE VIE W S

“The Edge of Order” Wonzimer Gallery

Adam Pendleton David Kordansky Gallery

The existence of an “edge,” a precipice, an ever-deepening chasm, a transitional space from one reality into the next—be it from spring to summer, enslavement to freedom, life to death—involves a commitment to a new beginning, an awakening of sorts into an alternate way of being. That is the hallmark of human existence—that change is inevitable. Conversely, as human beings, we are constantly attempting to ascribe order to our lives, to make some sense of the nonsensical, to divine the unknown. In the exhibition “The Edge of Order,” on view at Wonzimer G a l l e r y, t h e s e two seemingly incontrovertible impulses are visually translated by Todd Williamson and Christina Craemer. Although similar in theme, Williamson and Craemer adopt very different approaches to this subject. Williamson’s large-scale paintings feel nearly monolithic in their physicality and the sheer weight of their presence. In Magnificent Obsession (2020), for example, a deeply saturated red, reminiscent of Rothko’s complex palette, appears to seep into the picture frame with a single line of lighter crimson dividing the two halves of the image. As with Rothko’s luminous color field studies, Willamson’s paintings careen into near-spiritual territories, raising questions of subjectivity and our relationship to the living world. Is this small red line a division between two worlds, or a portal through our psyches to the other side of comprehension? Either way, in the end, it does not matter as the sheer expansiveness of the broadening field of red sweeps us deeper into the image. Christina Craemer’s works are also imbued with a transcendent quality albeit drawn from completely different sources. Craemer’s Mirari Line (2020), as with all of her work in the show, celebrates the movement of paint, mimicking a waterfall at various stages. In this image, the sudden heft of white paint appears to “fall” from the top of the canvas, downward, much the way a waterfall builds up speed at the top, to crash violently at the bottom. The violence of nature is implied here as the tension at the top of the painting dissipates into a ghostly convergence at the bottom. As our human consciousness continues to expand and retract, and we “edge” nearer our own understanding of our place in the cosmos, art that investigates the impulse toward spiritual awakening, feels more necessary than ever.

Adam Pendleton’s first solo exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery unfolds across three exhibition spaces and invites viewers to engage with the different aspects of his unusual and critical practice. Large black-and-white paintings with the repeated phrase “WE ARE NOT,” hang in one large space. In the smaller rear gallery behind it, Pendleton exhibits grids of framed collages on mylar. Finally, in a custom-built tall screening room designed for a vertically-formatted projection, he presents What Is Your Name? Kyle Abraham, A Portrait, (2018–19), a 19-minute video about the dancer Kyle Abraham. Pendleton’s paintings are powerful and direct as well as poetic, expressive and gestural. He begins with a fragment of a phrase that is often selected from a historical treatise or speech, like those by Malcolm X, and explores in a Dadaist manner, the representation of the words through the fracturing and recombining of the phrase. Through successive layering of “we,” “are” and “not” spray-painted over and over again in multiple sizes, tones of black and white, and opacities, he creates a symphonic rhythm of words that suggest different implications and meanings depending on what order they are read in. The paintings begin to make even more sense when seen in conjunction w i t h P e n dleton’s mylar collages. Presented as large grids of between 15 and 36 works, these pieces are filled with appropriated images and texts culled from art historical and political sources obscured with handwritten marks and gestural erasures. Their graphic quality reiterates the urgency of their collective message. The subtext in all of Pendelton’s work is an exploration of issues of race as well as the relationships between blackness and abstraction. Pendleton melds together numerous voices and image fragments, choreographing them into quasi-narratives that weave through time to elucidate and challenge racial biases. The overall effect is intentionally didactic and bombastic. Pendleton has something to say and says it loudly. Though not subtle, the works are never preachy but Pendleton is interested in exposing as well as educating. The works become a conversation between past and present, maker and viewer. Taking the idea of conversation further, Pendleton also presents a short video in an enclosed screening room where he interviews the dancer Kyle Abraham as he twirls and reflects on Pendleton’s questions. Though Pendleton is never seen, the video unfolds as a conversation that ebbs and flows like a dance. It eventually splits, dividing the screen vertically in thirds, presenting Abraham’s fragmented body out of sequence. At first, the video seems disconnected from the collages and paintings, but as the third in a series of video portraits presented in the context of his static work, it becomes clear that this medium allows Pendleton to create moving paintings that sequence actions and words. The spoken texts expand upon his explorations of time and memory, but more importantly, give presence to the Black body that is alluded to in the other works.

Todd Willimson, Magnificent Obsession, 2020. Courtesy Wonzimer Gallery

Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2020. Courtest David Kordansky Gallery.

By Eve Wood

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B U N K E R

Still from The Spook Who Sat By the Door, 1973.

V I S I O N

Fifty years ago, when the Manson murders were daily headline news, the reporting emphasized anything that might pass for “hippie behavior,” while playing down Manson’s intended goal to start a race war. The dog-whistling, race-based law and order tropes of politicians couldn’t have this degenerate agreeing with their we-don’t-say-it-out-loud messaging. Manson didn’t pull the idea out of thin air. He was just being honest about what his actual goals were. At just about any protest nowadays you are likely to see a gaggle of beige Gravy Seals waddling around with giant guns that they barely have the strength to lift. They are armed and ready for anything that doesn’t require too much physical exertion. So, who exactly was this war against? In the late 1960s the Black community started to really get organized. The Black Panthers offered a visual flourish of paramilitary style that triggered the worst fears of the white hood set. In 1969 a novel by Sam Greenlee dealing with Black militancy finally found a publisher in the UK (after being rejected by numerous US publishers). In 1973 it was adapted into a film. Both were titled The Spook Who Sat By the Door. The titular “spook” was a double pun. It was a word that derogatorily referred to both Black people and spies. Although the film came out at the height of the Blaxploitation genre, it feels more professional than many films of that ilk. The filmmaker had spent five seasons (1965–71) as a cast member (the sole Black one) of Hogan’s Heroes. “By the door” was code for placing a minority where they would be the first person that people saw when they visited your place of business. The plot concerns a call by higher-ups to integrate the CIA. The head honchos of the CIA (crackers in polyester) recruit a number of Black men and devise a training program so rigorous that nobody can pass it. With each round of eliminations, one small unassuming man in glasses survives. He refuses to join parties, and toes the line so completely that the others start calling him an Uncle Tom. His humble demeanor causes the bosses to actually be happy that somebody survived, to sit by the door. He is given a really fancy title that translates to “photocopy machine operator,” where he continues to build his data base of knowledge. When politicians come to visit, he is tasked with giving them the tour. He is the perfect token. Then he quits to pursue “social work.” This social work turns out to consist of teaching his fellow community members everything he learned at the CIA. The community is portrayed much like the Black Panther communities in a best case scenario. They employ some Oceans Eleven–level subterfuge to appropriate a giant cache of weapons. The movie ends with well-trained and well-armed Black militias staging the first volleys of a race war in every major US city. Bowing to government pressure, the film was buried by the studio, until somebody decided to give it a DVD release in the mid-aughts. The negative was found in a mislabeled film can. It is now available on DVD and a full version often turns up on YouTube. This year it was featured as a revival selection at the NY Film Festival. Given how well this film has aged, its second life is well deserved.

T he Shape

o f Life

Gar y Brewer, curator

Cheyann Washington

Nasim Hantehzadeh

Tim Hawkinson

Mercedes Dorame

Patty Wickman

Gary Brewer

Jeff Colson

Aline Mare

Tim Musso

January 8 – February 7, 2021 Opening January 8 “ In the piece Ovo, the primal aspect of the egg is a universal expression of birth, potential, and growth. It is a seed, an embryo and a primordial symbol of the shape of life–the origin from whence we came into the light.” —Gary Brewer

621 S. Olive Street, Los Angeles Tim Hawkinson, Ovo 60"×40" Ink on synthetic paper, 2020

For appointment contact wonzimer.com wonzimerinfo@gmail.com @wonzimer

ENTERTAINMENT & THE ARTS ATTORNEY

Stephen J. Goldberg

A creative lawyer for the creative community (323) 740-2800 • Stephen@stephengoldberglaw.com

P O E M S

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B A B S

Imagine That for YC BY klipschutz

Rachel Cusk flies first class and drives a hybrid. Waiting at the bus stop I raise my hand. If I change the names is it fiction? What if I keep the names and make up lies? Or is that like saying it’s a poem if it rhymes? Thomas Hardy’s pen made hay from country towns.

The Poet’s Garden BY JOHN TOTTENHAM

Turning the empty pages of all the un-chronicled phases: the mythic lift, the staggered decline, indelibly etherized in real time. All the plans that were never hatched, preserved in ink-stained chicken scratch. The finer points that will never be unscrambled or unfurled, circling the drain of a chronological netherworld. My legacy a burden, not a gift, through which no one wants to sift.

Turn A Blind Eye BY BABS RAPPLEYE

Dear Babs, I’m a young artist a few years out of grad school. Recently my dad’s close friend asked if he could buy a painting I made about America’s racist prison industrial complex. In the spirit of transparency, he told me he planned to give it as a gift to an old business partner. The problem is, the dude in question was a racist governor who helped engineer the horrors my work is about. I really need the money, but I don’t want my art to go to a person I detest. What should I do? —Skeptical Sell Out Dear Skeptical, Think of this as a chance to test the power of your art and the strength of your convictions. You could sell the piece and bet on its transformative power. Who knows, maybe one day the new owner might look at it, see the error of his ways, and become a prison abolitionist. But that’s pretty unlikely. You could pull a Hans Haacke and create a contract to accompany the work in perpetuity. Put anything you want in it: make the owner donate future sales from the work to The Innocence Project, require an explanatory text accompany its installation, insist it be loaned to any non-profit art space that wants to show it. While your dad’s gubernatorial chum probably won’t honor the contract, at least its existence might deflect efforts to obscure the message behind your work. If it makes you feel any better (and it probably won’t), many well-respected and successful artists who make work with clear progressive agendas find their art owned by truly reprehensible people. Rich assholes want the same art as their rich friends, even when it contradicts their vomitous politics—and they’ll do anything to get it. But in this instance, you get to choose, and that’s quite an opportunity to stand by your convictions. If, in the end, you decide not to sell, at least you’ll have a good story for years to come. You stood firm when times were tough and did what you thought was right for you and your work. And that, in the end, is priceless.

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2021: 15 YE ARS IN PRINT FE ATURING LA art news: SHOPTALK; legal art column: ART BRIEF; regular columns; profiles of up-and-coming artists; reviews in LA; comics and our snarky art advice columnist: ASK BABS

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Kevin Duffy is an LA-based actor, filmmaker and writer, who recently performed in Refracted Theater Company’s Homeless Garden—a reimagination of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard set in present-day where climate change and politics coincide. The play was performed live in New York City using a technique called panto-theater, where audience members listen to pre-recorded audio of the play on headphones while watching actors perform live at a distance. ARTILLERY: Can you describe the showings of the play and how the live performances came together? KEVIN DUFFY: It was socially distanced, COVID-compliant. We performed in two public parks in New York City. The audio of the play was pre-recorded, so it was like a soundtrack in a movie. The audience was about 50 people, which was limited by the number of headsets we had, and the audience and actors were listening to the same audio in the headsets. In Prospect Park, which was the first performance—we were among the trees—which was great for the play, and the next week we did it in Central Park. The sets were the environment. What were the logistics of rehearsal for the actors regarding COVID? We had two days of rehearsal in person and we rehearsed by Zoom individually with the director beforehand. How did panto-theater differ from other theater experiences you’ve had as an actor? We wanted it to be a theater experience but it did feel a lot like dance because there was so much focus on the movement. I guess I had an advantage because I’ve done dance and I’m really comfortable with movement. It was like performing to a musical score except the score was actual audio to the play.

Kevin Duffy INTERVIEWED BY LEANNA ROBINSON

R E C O N N O I T E R

Did you find the movements were more exaggerated in regards to dance or typical theater? That was part of the process; the director didn’t want them to be too dance-y but we are in this very strange situation in which we are wearing masks, have headphones on, and have to communicate physically with people who are at a distance outdoors. So you do have to adjust the scale of the performance to the environment. How do you see the future of theater progressing in light of COVID? You hear about productions that are ramping up and different attempts to do theater in safer environments. Hopefully the theater-makers can acknowledge this is what’s going on and make that work for the piece. So instead of pretending that everything’s normal and I’m just standing behind plexiglass, wearing a mask, if that’s the case then it becomes part of the set or part of the design. So in this case the way the director incorporated that is by having us outdoors, by having us in a natural environment, which really worked with this particular play. Recordings of the performance of Homeless Garden are available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. Website: www.refractedco.com/.homeless-garden.

Photograph by Kayla Williamson.

VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES

Sadie Benning This is Real January 2021

1700 S Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90021 +1 213 623 3280 vielmetter.com

EXPLORING ED RUSCHA’S ARCHIVE Take a virtual ride along Sunset Boulevard with artist Ed Ruscha. Featuring more than 65,000 photos from 12 trips Ruscha made down Sunset between 1965 and 2007, this interactive online exhibition guides us from DTLA to PCH, past iconic sites such as the Pacific Cinerama Dome, the Roxy Theatre, Chateau Marmont, and everywhere in between. Drive and watch Los Angeles change over time (without the traﬀic). Start driving at 12sunsets.getty.edu.