No surprise, of course, that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is also participating in the Pacific Standard Time extravaganza, with two major exhibitions, a multi-media installation, and two other installations reminding us of the pioneering work of two very different artists, Edward Kienholz and Maria Nordman. Too much for a single afternoon...
The Edward Kienholz installation, Five Car Stud 1969-1972, Revisted...
...has already provoked a good deal of talk and writing, though nowhere near the kind of controversy and, indeed, the censorship with which it was greeted at the time of its original creation. With its graphic evocation of the castration of a black American by a band of rednecks in the headlights of a circle of five cars, it's as intense an experience as it was back then. Our visceral response is shock and nausea, all the more so because we ourselves are invited to walk through the scene and share in the guilt of the assailants through our passivity. As the friend with whom I visited the installation remarked, we leave our footprints among those of thousands in the dirt. What has changed, perhaps, since the 1960s, is the cultural context: back then, the relatively innocent "Back Seat Dodge" by Kienholz was sufficient to bring down the wrath of the establishment and cause an uproar of protest. Today, even "Five Car Stud" raises scarcely an eyebrow in the community at large--and brings in thousands of visitors to the museum. (Of special interest in this installation is the ample documentation that accompanies the actual work, detailing the creation of the work, the response, and subsequent history. It's worth spending time with.)
It's now several decades since I spent time with Maria Nordman in the small studio in Venice which had been magically transformed with scrims and light into an exhibition in itself. So it was a pleasure to find her included in LACMA's PST program, with the installation of one of her early video works in Filmroom: Smoke, 1967-Present...
...Nordman has occupied a singular place among those artists preoccupied with perception--the familiar, if not entirely accurate term is "Light & Space"--and this work is a deceptively simple piece of "smoke and mirrors," almost literally, juxtaposing two screens and an actual (rather ugly!) armchair which appears also in the videos, on the beach, in the rising tide, as a prop to a young couple whose action consists in smoking cigarettes. We are invited to observe the way in which we observe the shifting scene in time and space.
...is a delight to the eye for anyone with an interest in the way we live our lives and the things we create to make them pleasant and practically livable. The show covers a vast array of material, from the pre-war architectural work of emigres like Neutra and Schindler to the post-WWII "Case Study" houses, to the interior design of Ray and Charles Eames...
It includes fine examples of the work of ceramic artists Laura Andresson and Otto and Gertrud Natzler...
...(see also below), along with commercial pottery from Brayton Laguna and Catalina Island; and the swimsuits of Rudi Gernreich and Mary Ann DeWeese. It's about the ease and pleasure--and privilege--of living in this part of the world, with its temperate climate and pervasive sunshine, and about the way in which this influences the objects that we make and put to daily use. I tend, myself, to lay the emphasis on privilege because many, though not all, of these objects speak of luxury. Interesting, though, that luxury in our age is seen in terms of the clean, spare, pared-down design and minimal visual excess. It seems clear that the influence of Asian aesthetic principle and practice runs deep in our culture today.
ASCO was for the streets. The word itself means disgust; I've had enough. A manifestation of the irreverent, rebellious spirit of Chicano East Los Angeles, ASCO was purposefully confrontational, sometimes offensive, always on the edge of risk and danger. It made people like me--white, anglo-saxon, educated, proper--nervous. It's important to be reminded of that moment in history in ASCO: Elite of the Obscrue, A Retrospective, 1972 - 1987. The core group of artists, Gronk, Willie Herron, Patssi Valdez and Harry Gamboa Jr., staged performances, street actions...
...public art projects with the express political intention of drawing attention to the hegemony of the dominant anglo culture--and the vibrant energy of their own. They were ready to attack institutions, with spray paint if necessary. They demanded to be heard. And were notably successful in opening the way for change in deeply-ingrained cultural attitudes. ASCO the show is a useful and timely reminder of that effort, in no small part because the institution tends to slip back into its old ways. What happens, though, when that energy gets boxed and framed for installation in a museum gallery is that some of the punch that defined its very essence gets diluted. The best moments of the exhibition are those where real art work pops up amongst the memorabilia and hits us in the eye.
Murals, too, are action--along with the graffiti that are their calligraphic cousins. Concurrent with ASCO, the Los Four group was busy asking us to reconsider the role of painting in our lives, taking it from the polite living room wall, sometimes illegally, to the city streets. Judy Baca was using the art to educate and create community. In association with the ASCO exhibition, Mural Remix: Sandra de la Loza reminds of those efforts in a multimedia show that creates a working assemblage of Chicano mural artists...
...historical and contemporary. Her installation is in part a celebration of ethnic identity, in part an exploration of the way in which it informs her own identity as an artist.
Much to be seen, then, much to be learned in LACMA's forays into the history of our city's art. I have to say, though, that what actually moved me most intensely on this visit to the County was the mid-career exhibition of Glenn Ligon's work. Glenn Ligon: AMERICA is one of those shows whose sheer, brute authenticity grabs you by the collar and makes you see things in a whole new way--in this case, through the eyes of a gay black man in a country that remains uncomfortable in its relationship with both gay and black. Our eyes descend through levels of obscurity in his coal-dust paintings, opening at the top with the lettering of a familiar--and usually disturbing--cliche and ending, at the bottom, in total obscurity...
We experience, in the metaphor of Ralph Ellison, what it is to be "the invisible man." There's both pain and defiance in these paintings that draw us in, through the movement of the eye, into their glittering, distressingly beautiful darkness. In another series of works, Ligon confronts us with Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic images of black men, and explores his own ambivalence between their stunning beauty and their explicitly sexual exploitation by the photographer.
Perhaps because I try so hard to practice it myself, I have a special respect for artists who devote their work to unsparingly honest self-examination. "Tell me who you are" has become the adage I take with me to every exhibition, because when I encounter that honesty on the part of another human being, I inevitably learn more about myself. Aside from its sheer, seductive aesthetic beauty, Ligon's work offers me the opportunity to see what makes him human, and prompts me to also take a thoughtful look inside, to be honest with myself about the harmful prejudices I harbor toward others; and perhaps, through the experience, to become a little better at the compassionate art of being more fully human.
And finally, speaking of beauty, I stopped by the Couturier Gallery on my way home from LACMA, to see the Gertrud & Otto Natzler show. These originally Viennese exiles who escaped from the Nazis at the time of the Anschluss set up their studio in Los Angeles and produced some of the most exquisite modernist pottery to be seen anywhere. Gertrud was the thrower--of marvelously intricate, stately, sometimes delicate forms; and Otto the glazier, who invented dozens of highly original and, yes, beautiful glazes in a stunning array of colors. The results, in no matter what scale, are nothing short of spectacular.
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