Livin' LA by Cirrus Gallery & Cirrus Editions

LIVIN’ LA By Michael Haight

There was an inherent dialogue within the archive’s display in Livin’ L.A. centered on artists and their dealings with influence. I subscribed to their influence on Wrinkle’s and Milant’s showing of Living L.A. Influence in this form is often times languid, ill-informed, two-fold: bifurcated at the geographic and the past born of the present, however, languidness in L.A. can be useful, and in a way it can invigorate one with youth more-so than the waiting room of Dr. Richard Ellenbogen’s fancy antiques. It’s funny the word antiques comes up as here in Cirrus’s walls one wonders whether these artists in the ‘Then’ category should be considered antiques amongst the newer, contemporary faces. (Following the metaphor until enough is

enough) do the works of Celmins, O’Shea, Chicago and Price see themselves remade in the works of Moon, Woods, Curtis, and Haines? Is Edge on the same stage as Ramos? Is such a stage Woodstockian or Coachelleano? Is Kessler the same as Lee like Pittman is to Ruscha? Is Tirado saying all of this in his excavation of Diana Zlotnick’s crevasse? Cirrus’s exhibition, Living L.A., is a signal to artists past from those present that we all live in the same continent and live for the same purposes among the following noted facets

THE LANGUID FLAMINGOS ALONGSIDE THE SANGUINE HORSE PEOPLE

Although you won’t notice it ﬁrst, the painting by Rachel Kessler, Escape, is the piece you should happen across before you stand before Margaret V. Haines totem to thematic casserole. Look long and hard because it’s going to come back to you once you get to Lee’s work. Now, If I had to tell you about every single rubber band it would take to hold together all of the conceptualism contained in this horse stolen from a Lady Gaga concert after it was discarded and kept around like it wasn’t refuse I’d go hoarse explaining the signiﬁcance Robert Morris’ box sculpture has when in conjunction with the career of Lady Gaga. But the story of Mazeppa, too? Is this the L.A. of mish-mash-hodge-podge-chop-suey-remix-horse-shit?

Margaret V. Haines Horse (for Lady Gaga’s exquisite corpse and Lord Byron’s Mazeppa after Robert Morris’ Box With The Sound Of Its Own Making), 2011

How many times will the decapitated equine garble out “HOARSE” before you ﬁnally piece together this assumed trifecta of canonical works and their jugular of thematic dialogue? We see Mazeppa only semi-nude instead of fully nude on a not so wild horse, we see imitation Lady Gaga whimsically daydreaming on another framed ‘T-shirt’ next door and the decapitated horse sets his foot down into a gaudy iridescent purple bucket down below. I want to say something about ‘kicking the bucket’ but I’ve already run up my tab on puns in this section. What would Robert Morris think? Byron? Lady Gaga? If this is what it’s like to live in Los Angeles, to have to take it upon yourself to collage together as many high-art low-art pop-art references to make something into ‘cool,’ then so be it, because as long as this happens, as long as a multitude of gnashing teeth are smashed together for the pleasure of an artist rather than the respect of the viewer’s intelligence there will be no over throwing New York.

CALVIN LEE’S PINPOINTING OF BEVERLY HILLS

The L.A. state-of-mind is attuned to a certain, well-ﬁlled, degree of celebrity hard-on seeking inebriation similar to the way our brains soak up delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or opioids. In Sedona, Arizona there are large iron deposits which create certain energy ﬂows that, for those who can feel them, input and output communicative and introspective vortices of power. In the case of Los Angeles, California these iron deposits come in the form of celebrity and said forms are able to magnetize their subjects at a higher expression of tangible power. In point of fact, we see, via Lee’s photographs, one such form of celebrity causing a cascade of bodies to rush upon his location likened, but not exact, to the power of a black hole. Yes, dying stars, and dead stars, all have the capacity to pull us towards Hollywood Blvd and the tours given by the likes of TMZ and those who sell maps of the stars’ homes. Lee’s capture of

Calvin Lee Beverly Hills Logo, 2011

the haphazard audience shows us a different kind of languid flamingo. Wrinkle’s juxtaposition within Cirrus’ north hallway of these two scenes sets one to understand the modes of L.A. life each artist, of the ‘now’ persuasion, elicits to duplicate, commiserate, and replicate. Kessler’s Escape is the dream of those, fed up or consumed, by the celebrity craving so many have on their tongue. It is the kind of escape that even a crevasse in Griffith Park cannot fulfill. Calvin’s Arnold is the entrance, the avenue, the inescapable, and then again, for so many, the notion of Kessler’s painting is the unattainable in the same way Calvin’s Beverly Hills Logo and all the logogram defines. Beverly Hills doesn’t want us as much as the different kind of languid flamingoes want Arnold Schwarzenegger.

IMITATION DESTRUCTION NEXT TO THE LAUGH FACTORY ON LAUREL CANYON AND SUNSET. PLAYING THE ROCK STAR; FAKING IT TIL YOU MAKE IT AS A PERFORMER

John P. Hogan Silent Guitar at Laurel Canyon & Sunset (Performance Document) 2011

Who has documentation of this performance? I haven’t seen it other than this forgery of an action shot in front of The Laugh Factory (this location instead of the House of Blues or even the Viper Room for Christ’s sake?). For Issac Tigrett’s sake, or Sai Baba’s sake, rather, there were far better choices, but I digress. Now, if, while supplying others with your talent in Los Angeles, you do not adequately or fulfillingly document your supplication of said talent there will be no perpetual applause. No more friendly fans for you. Hogan’s image tells us that it is the implement that brings us to supplicate others with our talent; that it is the flat-dimensioned, cartoonish coquetry, and silent partner to our aspirational schemes. And to me, that’s fine. That is the sort of sentiment we cater to, we cartograph, we mesmerize ourselves with on the daily with this self-brewed, media-brewed, culture-brewed, society-encrusted sense of importance via personal spectacle. You may not know what I am talking about but in any case, it has much to do with L.A.’s celebrity-dosed culture and much ado with living ‘L.A.’

MOVIES.

The posters by Bobbi Woods included in the exhibition are rejections, ignorance, and unknowns of the glamour fundamental to Hollywood ﬁlm advertising. The detritus and the rebellion against that which so many hopefuls emigrate to L.A. initially—hoping to ﬁnd an entrance into the all invisible spires of the kingdom’s castle walls. These works are the representations of the ignored—and being ignored is a large part of living in L.A. whether you understand its appreciable value or not. Who’s to say the pertinent memories of these L.A. cast offs are displayed in these posters? Largely incoherent, except for their decrepit text or the shine of that underneath swaths of black paint, these posters speak to those who fumble through this culture of disregard. Have you ever listened to one who has been deemed ‘ignored?’ For that which isn’t up to snuff there is one who listens and must have an ear so sensitive, equipped with aural hairs thin enough to gather Aeolian winds of a femtometer in length. The ignored need you to look closely for the shine of something evident underneath all of the grime imposed by an angered artistic providence. And if you take a femtosecond to look more closely, then there you’ll see a better view of what lies beneath each of Bobbi Wood’s elementa ignoratum.

Bobbi Woods As Long As #3, 2009

FRIENDS.

Leslie Moon’s Fs For Your Friends is on the ground. Mirrors, pasties, and remnants of a found cosmetics display tell the viewer that in Los Angeles there isn’t a friend for you if you’re ugly. There isn’t a friend for you depending on if they too are slutty. There isn’t a friend for you if you don’t value the objectiﬁcation of mirrors. There isn’t a friend for you to stand on glass or inspect what is left of that raft of crème brûlée you had after that scone, and you don’t have a friend that’ll give a fuck about what people are like back home. Is the sculpture that one sided as Hogan’s Silent Guitar? Is Los Angeles that shallow? Is it

Lesley Moon Fs for your Friends 2011

that debased or biased or ruined by such standards of societal ﬁltering that said spatiotemporal-perambulatory algorithms of judgment can space a person apart from the norms they wish, attempt, pursue, and maintain to follow. Los Angeles is not the Freemasons: you do not have to ask one to be one. You can act as you are one and hope to be noticed as one, but you cannot ask one to be one.

DOUG EDGE YOU COY AND CLOYING ASSHOLE

Pure Air Hope Chest is the optimistic side of living in a dream of prehistorically perfectly pristinely picturesque piquantly peacock and powdery aqua-velvet skies of so many of Los Angeles’s cliffs, valleys, and her surrounding environs. Yes I feminize the area. I romanticize the skies of the area’s past. Doug Edge doesn’t want to see a that-kind-of-dirty Los Angeles, hacking off an exhaust pipe and dribbling the toxic perfume of PCBs, PPPs, Low-Lying Ozone, methane, and arsenic at 220 parts per million. How can you not smile when Los Angeles’s streets and freeways are as gleefully smoothed

Doug Edge Pure Air Hope Chest, 1971

as the cast resin of Edge’s sculpture? The process of ﬁnish-fetish applied to our smoggy skies, with its smoothing, cleaning, de-grit-fying properties, sounds like something to hope for. That’s coy and cloying, too. It is artifacts like Edge’s that may make a difference enough in the consciousness of the Los Angeles culture of personal transportation, a dent sizeable enough to make us think twice about the necessity of oil to transport us when there is electricity, and there is natural gas, and there are more and more bike lanes here today and tomorrow. Then again, a hope chest is used as a repository for items to be used when one reaches a certain state—marriage, for instance. While one isn’t allowed full view into the contents of Edge’s piece, we are, of course, left to wonder when, where, why, what, how and who will take us to where the air is cleaner than Kokomo. What do you suppose we’re going to need to use when we (ﬁnally) get there?

THE WATER AND THE SKY

Vija Celmins is out ﬂoating above the Long Beach Harbor the San Pedro and Santa Monica Bays, way out past Avalon with the ﬁsh we never see, and with the waves. She looks for meaning in the same way we others look for meaning: accept the random abstractedness of above and along the globe. Where else could there be a drought and so many happy with the precious swathes of sky? The oceans and the skies are both perfect candidates when it comes to the search for an

Vija Celmins Untitled (Sky), 1975

ever undulating, ever random muse. Celmins’s works tell us of L.A’s other magnets for the masses and in their display the viewer becomes one as a part of such a mass. There are the Buddhist elements of the one from the many and the many into one. Sitting along the shoreline of Southern California one understands their submergence into the masses spells anonymity for the personal and materialization of the general. The ocean, the sky allows a subject to be OK with anonymity of the personal in the way all push forward together, upwards, downwards, outwards, inwards, all with a goal of movement, all with the randomization of the spectacular.

PILLS.

I could tell you what this means if you tell me what that means. I will drop my pen in acid and write upon a tablet and etch the letters to you; the letters, in combinative forms, spell out what I know as truth. Terry O’Shea’s menagerie of untitled resins spell out such stories as the mapping of the human genome in Untitled (slab), the prescription drug culture of now in his untitled pill and in his untitled wall piece the senarium nocturnus of Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar. There isn’t a pill you can take in Los Angeles that will make you live it better than the life of O’Shea’s gift to LACMA—an unknown sculpture chucked over the fence and resting at the bottom of the blackened sea crater of La Brea. You can black out in L.A. and wake with the realization that that Folger’s commercial would have been your break-out gig but you can’t take a pill that’ll lift you to the clarity of O’Shea’s resins.

Terry O’Shea Untitled (slab)

Terry O’Shea Untitled 1968

SANGUINE FLAMES

It is a fountain but like L.A. read in as a mountain of all passions located in this city and its environs. There are not enough people here to feed every ﬂame—it’s a reason for the valley being so burdened and ashen. There is the red ﬂick, and a cigarette rests upon Studio City—and on the reverse, waterfalls and waterfalls of complaints about the wastefulness of the city’s fountains—Something, Something, the Mayor’s water bill.

Rachel Kessler Fountain, 2010

THE TEASING TRYST OF SHOPPING

To live L.A. is to see same-same begetting same-same only successively with a different name-name like a game-game to buy the same-same but believe it as, each successive time-time, wholly different.

Lesley Moon [Stills From] Beverly Hills Idyll, 2010

THE ABSENCE AND RE-ABSENCE OF SEX

Greg Curtis’s “brb” (Chinese Walls) is a manifold distance between several subjects: this L.A. sex scene, sex trafﬁcking, sex’s thrust on the L.A. psyche, sex and distrust, and that L.A. sex scene. Sure each scene re-appears as the video loops. And sure the workers never show up for the gang bang in their many pillowed walls of interstitial sexual innuendo and panopticon of convergent invisible pussies. Los Angeles is like that. Some days are absent of somebody to love. Some times the sex reappears in Pittman’s neediness and Ruscha’s liquid lines. Orlando Tirado’s Of Course I Love You… travels to those realms of personal subversity and the underground river of L.A.’s lairs of perpetual liars. Let the art speak to a friend you know, to your hard-on, to your boyfriend’s hard-on. When do we truly know what is going on in our lover’s head?

Greg Curtis “brb” (Chinese walls), 2011

VIOLENCE.

The music of NWA sits next to Vincent Ramos’s Untitled. All of the memories of the era pool in dissatisfaction. Racial unrest is a major key. Solution in the minor. Ramos is at the center of Livin’ L.A.’s display of such unrest. His work with the archive is one of connection and the conjecture sometimes made after balancing history on top of pop culture. In many ways the work of Vincent Ramos is for those aware of history and its historians as the go to for an inkling as to why we’re here, as to why we are where we are going. Ramos’s installation, so inherently archival, is this time, as opposed to the ﬁrst exhibit, wholly his own personal narrative. While his Billy Barty Guy DeCointet reference points were the stage for Ramos’s own birth, this untitled installation builds upon Los Angeles’s social structure. Like the archive, Ramos’s display of information does not point ﬁngers or hint at new possibilities. It is there to say remember while we make new decisions in the hopes we will not regret.

Vincent Ramos Untitled 2011

IDOLATRY.

Tirado’s Kurt (II) isn’t as much in L.A. or of L.A. as it sits inside a Washington native. Sure you can say without L.A. Cobain would have been nothing. L.A. magnetizes passion and for some duly supplies passions with payouts: stardoms, fandoms, kingdoms. Los Angeles has got a million people wearing Nirvana t-shirts. How many people have a Baldessari shirt that’s non-ironic, or a Tyler Matthew Oyer shirt that is actually worn instead of residing in a vitrine? Oh, the lines and lines of teenagers at the bus stops wearing OBEY t-shirts. Andre the Giant has a Posse and it’s all thanks to Shepard Fairey. Art stars in L.A. are few and far between when compared to music stars. Tirado may be speaking to Kurt but he makes one think who is the Cobain of the Art world, the Bieber, the Michael Jackson? Cobain burns on like a crevasse in the Viper Room or a bathroom in Grifﬁth Park.

Orlando Tirado Kurt (II) 2011

MORE SUNLIGHT IN THE DARK.

This is the torch of Judy Chicago amongst the ignorance of men. Judy Chicago’s Mary Queen of Scots is just a sliver from her landmark work “The Dinner Party.” This work, grouped next to Kenneth Price’s earthenware and silkscreen, displays the investigations LA artists made into the classical arts. Chicago’s lithograph merges color and line, detail and focus. Price’s attention to detail, and minimal accentuation compliments Chicago’s work: both hold down the investigation of meaning and allow each artwork to just be.

Judy Chicago Mary Queen of Scots, 1973

WISDOM.

High above the room with a view of empty sex nests lies Lari Pittman’s Existential and Needy. Placed far from Chicago’s sunlight and Price’s crab, like the title explains, Pittman’s piece craves a formulation of understanding vis-à-vis the composition of objects. The groupings of 69 do not speak to the sex act as much as they speak to the “Angel Number 69” (http:// sacredscribesangelnumbers.blogspot.com/2011/07/angel-number-69.html) This number, an amalgamation of vibrations relating to responsibility, unconditional love, humility and inner-

Lari Pittman Existential and Needy 1991

wisdom, takes on the role of poltergeist, throwing the viewer into the mess of information that can spill from one seeming ideograph to the next. Candle, owl, two-digit number divisible by 3. According to the site above this number, 69, is the calling of the angels for you to, “release your material possessions” and to “let go and release the old.” Release old wisdom? Los Angeles has a hard time letting go of that that brings material wealth but has no problem dropping one trend from the next.

MIMICRY.

That owl across the way on the projector shelf is a reﬂector. That’s all. How’s that for existentialism? Below the owl lies a video of videos from YouTube recorded by a small hand-held camera. The camera records as the unknown internet user clicks through a playlist of YouTube videos all focused on one thing: L.A. In Los Angeles all is fair game when it comes to impersonating your inﬂuences, mimicking your idols, and pouring inspiration through a meat grinder of détournement. So much to note in this exhibition, and the other three exhibitions in Cirrus’s series for PST, deals with the mimicry and re-hashing of older artists’ ideas by those of the current generation. And as mentioned above, even Price and Chicago’s works are re-hashings of traditional Japanese woodblock technique. The mimicry is not exact, but rather follows a spiraling out-ward of ideas through artistic avenues. Some may have the same thoughts as others; however,

value lies in the notice of those thoughts presented with différance. Sure, you cannot rely on meaning in the case of Price’s work but if you stare long enough at Greg Curtis’s Chinese Walls you begin to imagine the odalisques of possibility that might lay there. And depending on the extent of your art historical knowledge, the odalisques of your consciousness may mimic the works of Matisse, Lefebvre, Weiz, Bompard, Ingres, or the contemporary Browning, Goldin, Ovchinnikov, even Mike Kelley, or which ever image you ﬁnd when you Google image search ‘odalisque.’ Oftentimes, art, in the ongoing contemporary era, is just that, a restaging of past events for present purposes. Where we are able to see it is all thanks to our own personal archive of art historical knowledge and where we are able to stand in ignorance we are able to see only the stage itself.

SURVEILLANCE VS. VOEURISM

The drooling of shoppers at the mall of Leslie Moon’s Beverly Hills Idyll, the limp members of voyeurs who ﬁnd no odalisque present in Curtis’s “brb”, the onlookers of Lee’s Arnold Schwarzenegger at Bally, the owls overlooking Ramos’s Untitled, and the hoards of imaginary viewers for the imaginary movies in Wood’s ﬁlm posters, all walk the line between information gathering and pleasure seeking. The research possibilities in each of these works within Livin’ L.A. all provide the viewer with time honored activities of gawking and gazing—read looking. We are Helmut Newtons will L.A. our optical glass on which we delve into the structure of culture: bellicose,

Calvin Lee Arnold Schwarzennegger at Bally, 2011

wavering, ambiguous and ambivalent, afraid of desire and enamored with just the thought of it. We will trample others in order to gaze at some other self we’ve found on the movie screen. We will trample others in order to obtain that presented as unattainable. We will trample others in order to claim territory. We will trample others in order to seize upon a moment of possibility perpetually ﬂeeting. Is Ed Ruscha the only one who is allowed to say ‘Made in California?’

OVER VITRINE-ED DEPOSITORIES

Ramos’s vitrines play with the grey areas of race and culture where the ruling classes do not tend to look. “Who looks good in Santa Monican fog?” “Jesus Christ.” “Who knew…” There is austere silence within the vitrine-like display cases of Vincent Ramos’s Untitled; the news papers thick with headlines—the Riots of ’92. Ramos’s monsters are held beneath the ice of museum glass. His L.A., geographically maligned by racial unrest, racial discrimination, prejudice, and stereotypes—read as the squeezing of individuals into tiny boxes without caring of the refuse or juiced residue—is of an archive. I say ‘of an archive’ because each item is meticulously collected and chosen by Ramos. These are not the same archival ideas from his Billy Barty investigation, rather they scan Los Angeles’s horizon rather than pinpointing a Guy de Cointet opening as a needle through Ramos’s own origin of the world.

Taken out, viewed separately, these items therefore come ‘from an archive.’ Tell yourself these items come from the archive of MOCA, or the Museum of Tolerance, or the Getty Archive, or Smithsonian and you will see them as sacred. Yet, Ramos does not present these items sacredly, rather the items, residing in second-hand display cases from a jewelry store, hide, emblazoned in someone else’s history. Some pieces, if personiﬁed, may be embarrassed of their proposed history by writers, historians, and journalists alike because who is to say if any glint from any plane has been seen wholly, unapologetically, or as Bourdieu’s Habitus of informational investigation. How has life—read Culture—aligned us to see the misfortune that is a biased or maligned people within historical context? How has life aligned us to read any such context regarded in the societal context of History with a capital H? How do such things suffer under the solely criticized avenues of the angry sorts who

dally up their research money to explain why we should avoid such stagnant methods and instead opt for the androgyny of the histories. Ramos’s piece is a museum within a museum, a panopticon turned upon itself a panopticon and congregates complexities of histories, dimensions of which the artist has assembled under personal and delicate pickings and choosings. The viewer consults the faculty of their own intelligence and understanding of said histories while simultaneously arranging and comparing Ramos’s own plotting of the event’s structure. From the L.A.’s Hollywood perspective: the display’s narrative suggests a battle of good and evil surmised by cultural attitudes and expressions in conﬂict, at war it seems with the same ideal: shall good always prevail? And what of the loser in this charade of power? At the time of this installation, Ramos notes the concurrence of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and of helicopters peppering the air, while he and Wrinkle dialogued out in Cirrus’s front parking lot. The correlations between the riot’s pivotal moment in L.A.’s history and the disorganized swell in the nation’s history are in the way each acts as an awkward mirror image of one another: decisive insurrection versus indecisive and diluted direction.

THERE WAS A RUSCHA PRESENT

It was slippery, orange, and in the vicinity of Calvin Leeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s photography. It, the photography, contained the image of a green orange.

Ed Ruscha Made In California 1971

AND SOMEBODY’S LIFE

Remember that part above, about your Art Historical knowledge informing your consciousness of which odalisques to mimic within Curtis’s “brb” (Chinese Walls)? The better your knowledge, the better your archival shufﬂe-through, and the better you understand those involved in Tirado’s Installation With Selected Objects By Orlando Tirado and Diana Zlotnick From the Residence of Collector Diana Zlotnick. Compared to Wrinkle’s “The Past, Present and Future Done Here/ The Father, Son and Holy Ghost, a piece that used a curated portion of Zlotnick’s collection as a conceptual piece, “for validating current presentations of modernism artistically that are inﬂuenced socially,” (http:// aaronwrinkle.com/diana-zlotnick/) Tirado’s is the latent reversal on Wrinkle’s fortune via Zlot-

Orlando Tirado Installation With Selected Objects By Orlando Tirado and Diana Zlotnick From The Residence Of Diana Zlotnick 1971

nick’s access. Wrinkle’s fortune was the art, regardless of its inherent intellectual grounding in society’s pursuit of modernization, while Tirado’s fortune was everything mundane, quotidian, the un-art. Zlotnick’s personal effects—a blanket, heater, photos of her exercise techniques, a crusty soccer ball, etc—escape from the sanctity of the art collector’s art collection and lie outside the boundaries of imposed value to hold no value other than the shells of information they feign.