Is LA an "Art City?"

[croyboy]

good to know though

[archd1]

NY Times, October 1, 2006

Navigating the aesthetic sprawl is easier than it looks. 1. Jason Rhoades’s ‘‘Black Pussy’’ was both an art installation and a great place to hang out and have a drink. 2. Peres Projects, a must-stop gallery in Chinatown. 3. Francesco Vezzoli installation at Gagosian Beverly Hills. 4. Nancy Rubins at her Topanga Canyon studio in front of raw material for her piece ‘‘Big Pleasure Point,’’ recently at Lincoln Center. 5. Mark Grotjahn outside his studio in Hollywood and a painting in progress, 6., for his current solo show at the Whitney Museum. 7. Raymond Pettibon exhibiton at Regen Projects. 9. Aaron Turner, a student in the U.C.L.A. M.F.A. program, in his studio. 10. Installation in progress at the Hammer Museum in Westwood. 11. Ryan Trecartin at QED Gallery in Culver City. 12. Work in progress at Jorge Pardo’s design studio. 13. The artist Doug Aitken in his Venice studio. His first large-scale public work goes up at the Modern in January 2007.


Style
Artquake

By BRUCE HAINLEY
Photographs by ARI MARCOPOULOS

I am amused by fancy art-world types who breeze into Los Angeles planning to “get” the scene in a few days. They would have better luck reading “In Search of Lost Time” over a long weekend. America’s second-largest city sprawls — physically, aesthetically, socially — over nearly 500 square miles, so any attempt to nutshell the burg and its cultural bazaar takes on comic aspects. Note that the Pompidou Center’s recent survey of Los Angeles art was called “The Birth of an Artistic Capital” and that Michael Govan, the new director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has declared Los Angeles the new New York, forgetting perhaps that Angelenos have never wished to be New Yorkers and that long before the 1955 birth date pronounced by the Pompidou, Hollywood was producing things as provocative, philosophical and influential as anything given the name of, well, art.

Sun, sand, great surf, a climate usually allowing a smooth shift from beachwear to cashmere pullover and until recently — “recently” thanks to no major earthquake in more than a decade and brutalized New Yorkers’ finding respite here — relatively cheap studio and living spaces, all with easy access to the materials of the film, television and porn industries, explain why anyone, not just artists, would wish to live and work here.

“In the 50’s there was no art scene in L.A. at all,” Tom Marioni wrote some 30years ago in his artist-driven publication Vision. Marioni, that great conceptual troublemaker, encouraged aesthetics to mellow, so that we can all now claim that “The Act of Drinking Beer With Friends Is the Highest Form of Art” (as his 1970 “social sculpture” was titled). By his estimation, “not until about ’64 or ’65 did L.A. become known as an art center.” He also thought that the L.A. scene “burned fast and extinguished itself in 10 years,” but perhaps a few too many brews combined with the weather in his hometown of San Francisco had fogged his perspective.

You would have to ignore that by 1964 Irving Blum’s Ferus Gallery had already put on landmark shows (including Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans”) and that by 1975 Cal Arts was on fire: the institute could already claim as alums Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, Barbara Bloom, Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein and David Salle. But they all quickly decamped to New York — never mind that Robert Irwin, an L.A. native, and Ed Ruscha, a transplant from Oklahoma, had thrived out West long before their alma mater existed in Valencia.

It was some combination of John Baldessari moving to L.A. to teach many of those first Cal Arts grads and, soon after, the Cal Arts graduate Mike Kelley not moving to New York, that significantly changed the situation. Although such a synopsis jettisons all nuance, in L.A. it is not a confluence of museums, auction houses and galleries but the intense nexus of art schools (there are five major players, all vying to win the tartest students) and their renowned faculties (including, to cherry-pick one from each school, Mike Kelley, Catherine Opie, Thomas Lawson, Frances Stark and Larry Johnson) that remain key to challenging what art will be.

Often, an early sign of artistic success in New York is when the artist no longer has to teach to pay the rent; for over 30 years, major artists in L.A. have continued to teach in addition to carrying on stellar careers. Contrary to the air-headed local stereotype, it’s as if to be an artist worth the name means educating younger practitioners how to think critically about what is seen, an education the world, and image-obese America especially, too frequently has abandoned, since images are understood to be, I guess, transparent. (Dude, no way!) Combine this pedagogic tradition with the fact that one of the sharpest art journals anywhere, Afterall, is co-published here, and L.A. can shrug its shoulders.

Of course, no one wishes to be enrolled forever. It would be jejune to think that schools could, or should, provide more than the equivalent of a pair of Ray-Bans to guard against the UV rays of a solar art market. Carefree without major auction action and no distracting art fair (or, at least, not yet), L.A.’s galleries thrive as a system in which smarts and fun are on almost equal footing with business.

The reigning gallery style is brisk and low-key chic compared with Chelsea’s grand, mausoleumlike airs, and its gallerists, with lower overhead, take relatively more risks, mixing things up with bright group shows by nongallery artists. New venues have been springing up like some genetically altered mushroom able to thrive in full sunshine.

The already decentralized metropolis can now boast of galleries in neighborhoods from Culver City (the current center of buzz, if not always daring cerebration) to Chinatown and Santa Monica. Any thinking person would have to count David Kordansky’s and Daniel Hug’s galleries as well as Solo Projects and Sister, helmed, respectively, by Tom Solomon and Katie Brennan, as serious players. There is also Trudi, a brazen, vitrinelike alternative to the Wrong Gallery; the innovative nonprofit Outpost for Contemporary Art; and the inaugural sessions of the Sundown Schoolhouse, spearheaded by the indefatigable architect and catalyst, Fritz Haeg.

And, hey, the artist-impresarios Flora Wiegmann, Drew Heitzler and Justin Beal’s new bar, the Mandrake, gives needed juice to the Culver City drag, a place not only to spotlight what’s really on the local minds (the artist-curator Darren Bader’s bicoastal shindig, “Grupe,” started things off with a bang) or to test with friends the highest forms but also to sit in the corner, sloe-eyed, researching the timely goings-on.

L.A. has been nominated as an art capital before, and it will be again when the spotlight moves elsewhere. (Mexico City? Shanghai?) Gagosian Beverly Hills’s Oscar-week opening remains the only heady swirl of art and industry in Tinseltown. Art making goes on despite it all, behind closed doors, which is why it matters. Party of one — or plus one.

Bruce Hainley is associate director of graduate studies in criticism and theory at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. He is the author most recently of “Foul Mouth,” published by 2nd Cannons Publications.




Choose your vehicle of expression. 1. Wendy Yao commissions artists to make limited-edition things like T-shirts for her tiny Chinatown store, Ooga Booga. 2. Ruben Ochoa transformed his father’s van into a groovy mobile gallery, including an exhibition space, an office (in the front seat) and a janitor’s closet (in the back). 3. The artist and designer Jorge Pardo in the industrial work space where much of his furniture is produced. He recently designed a house in Naguabo, Puerto Rico, for a couple who collect his work. 4. The performance troupe My Barbarian in rehearsal at Redcat, an art space located in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex designed by Frank Gehry. 5. The pioneering L.A. artist Chris Burden at his studio in Topanga Canyon. (He is the husband of the artist Nancy Rubins.) For the past few years, Burden has been collecting and restoring vintage street lamps, 14 of which were installed at South London Gallery last month.




Who wouldn’t want to live and work here? 1. Robert Therrien’s cavernous studio is large enough to accommodate production of sculptures like this supersize card table and folding chairs. 2. Dave Muller is increasingly known for his ‘‘Top 10’’ paintings of record-album spines — not to mention his vast music collection. 3. The Milan-based gallerist Emi Fontana commissions installations in some of the best locations the city has to offer by artists like Olafur Eliasson and, more recently, Monica Bonvicini for her continuing project, West of Rome. 4. Jason Meadows and his sculptural installation at Marc Foxx Gallery on Wilshire Blvd. 5. U.C.L.A.’s is one of several competing Los Angeles art schools that release some 100 aspiring artists into the world each year, including Spencer Lewis, 6. The school has a warren of student studio spaces, 7., in Culver City. 8. An opening for the artist Emilie Halpern at Anna Helwing on Culver City’s gallery strip. 9. The artist and writer Frances Stark in her studio, located in an outdoor mall in Chinatown.




From old guard to arriviste. 1. Mike Kelley is considered one of the quintessential Los Angeles artists. Over the years he has banded up with the likes of Tony Oursler, Jim Shaw, Paul McCarthy and Dave Muller, to name a few. His Highland Park compound, 3., includes a music studio. 2. Like many Los Angeles artists, Pae White has found studio space in the unlikeliest of places. 4. A typical Saturdaynight opening at Blum & Poe in Culver City, where the party spills over into the parking lot. 5. Mark Grotjahn, in situ. 6. The Redcat curator Eungie Joo overseeing a sound installation by the French artist Mathieu Briand. 7. A peek inside the home of Beth Swofford, an agent at C.A.A., whose expansive private collection includes work by contemporary artists like Richard Prince and Luc Tuymans. 8. Justin Beal, along with Drew Heitzler and Flora Wiegmann, both formerly of Champion Fine Art and Williamsburg, recently opened the Mandrake, a bar and exhibition space conveniently located in the heart of the Culver City gallery scene. 9. For 40 years, Gemini G.E.L. has produced limited-edition prints for artists like Richard Serra, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Rauschenberg.

(Thanks to Citywatch at SSP)

[archd1]

From LA Observed:

Getty to return some art, not all

The Getty Museum said today it will return 26 looted antiquities to Italy, but broke off negotiations over twenty other pieces that Italian officials had sought. Not going back, the Times reports, is the bronze statue of a young Greek athlete that is considered one of the Getty's most prized pieces. The Getty's limestone figure of the goddess Aphrodite (left) is apparently also not being returned [for now, but the Getty offered to continue studying its ownership.] Museum director Michael Brand wrote Italian Cultural Minister Francesco Rutelli that he was "deeply saddened" the two sides couldn't agree on a settlement. Italian officials did not speak today but have been unhappy about the Getty's tactics and are said to be contemplating a cultural embargo.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...home-headlines

[saiholmes]

Originally Posted by archd1

Where is this place?

[Elsongs]

Originally Posted by archd1

Public Art in Downtown LA:

Dont forget the "underground" art Downtown...the ones in the subway stations, that is

[Vangelist]

>>> im not so sure i would call it an art city. alot of the "art" that comes out of here is stricky for economic gain. movies tv and music are the worst offenders. and unfortunetly our city is very much involved in the popyness of art rather then the emotionaly stimulating part of it.<<

Okay, again, this is insane. Are you reading any of the articles archd is posting here? It is downright insulting to see any list where Columbus - or Chicago or Seattle or wherever - is ranked higher than us, for as an art producing and education capital, we are second to only New York on the whole continent, or fuck, in this hemisphere. The scene here is gigantic and exploding, and everyone knows it's less "scene,"-y than Chelsea, because you never know who might have what industry connection here in LA, which is why you have to be nice to everyone, particularly if you're a gallerist. None of that NY snotty attitude. My friend is getting his PhD in Visual Studies in Irvine and frequents the downtown, Culver City and Chinatown galleries often, taking me in tow (do you even have any idea how many there are, botox???), and he'd concur with archd: internationally, we're unhesitatingly put up there with Paris and Berlin, with Tokyo close behind.

To try and self-loathingly denigrate our status, and attribute any of our fame to only "movies, tv and music" is not just woefully inaccurate..it's kind of mad.

[klamedia]

Originally Posted by archd1

Oh, please!....as if we're painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa! Ha!

No. You're giving her a mastectomy.

[godblessbotox]

Originally Posted by Vangelist

>>> im not so sure i would call it an art city. alot of the "art" that comes out of here is stricky for economic gain. movies tv and music are the worst offenders. and unfortunetly our city is very much involved in the popyness of art rather then the emotionaly stimulating part of it.<<

Okay, again, this is insane. Are you reading any of the articles archd is posting here? It is downright insulting to see any list where Columbus - or Chicago or Seattle or wherever - is ranked higher than us, for as an art producing and education capital, we are second to only New York on the whole continent, or fuck, in this hemisphere. The scene here is gigantic and exploding, and everyone knows it's less "scene,"-y than Chelsea, because you never know who might have what industry connection here in LA, which is why you have to be nice to everyone, particularly if you're a gallerist. None of that NY snotty attitude. My friend is getting his PhD in Visual Studies in Irvine and frequents the downtown, Culver City and Chinatown galleries often, taking me in tow (do you even have any idea how many there are, botox???), and he'd concur with archd: internationally, we're unhesitatingly put up there with Paris and Berlin, with Tokyo close behind.

To try and self-loathingly denigrate our status, and attribute any of our fame to only "movies, tv and music" is not just woefully inaccurate..it's kind of mad.

quit being a dick...

i stated my opinion and i stand by it so fuck off

also he had not posted any articles explaning why los angeles is how you think it is until after i had made my statement

[klamedia]

uh oh.......

[Imperfect Ending]

*gasp*

[archd1]

Originally Posted by godblessbotox

are you writing a paper or somthing?

Haha! I guess I'm just trying to answer the question....

[archd1]

Originally Posted by saiholmes

Where is this place?

It's at 333 S. Hope St., Arco Center...that's what the website says but I haven't seen it myself....

[archd1]

Originally Posted by godblessbotox

quit being a dick...

i stated my opinion and i stand by it so fuck off

also he had not posted any articles explaning why los angeles is how you think it is until after i had made my statement

Hey, what's going on? enough already...I'm not an art historian nor an art expert but I am quite interested in this field to do some "amateur" research, so there you are. I started to post the articles primarily to inform not just us but especially those who are not from LA but visit the forum regularly....I will continue to post in this thread in the coming months as more major art events in the city happen and I hope people can contribute as well. LA is undisputedly an art capital and no one can take that away from us. This is my contribution to LA boosterism in the same vein as Silverlakes's "Penelope" thread, Elsong's "LA 20016 Olympics" thread and Klamedia's "gentrification in yo' hood" thread... lol.

[archd1]

Originally Posted by Elsongs

Dont forget the "underground" art Downtown...the ones in the subway stations, that is

Oh yes....it's at the metro website right? I'll look into it...

[archd1]

Originally Posted by WANCH

One thing about LA is there are alot of murals. Also, what about the underground scene like graffiti and street art?

I can't find a decent website that shows great LA Graffiti art....I'll try again unless others have that info. There's Bansky, he's underground and recently exhibited here, but not an Angeleno.

Here's BANSKY'S highly succesful exhibit in LA: (From Flickr)

[godblessbotox]

Originally Posted by archd1

Hey, what's going on? enough already...I'm not an art historian nor an art expert but I am quite interested in this field to do some "amateur" research, so there you are. I started to post the articles primarily to inform not just us but especially those who are not from LA but visit the forum regularly....I will continue to post in this thread in the coming months as more major art events in the city happen and I hope people can contribute as well. LA is undisputedly an art capital and no one can take that away from us. This is my contribution to LA boosterism in the same vein as Silverlakes's "Penelope" thread, Elsong's "LA 20016 Olympics" thread and Klamedia's "gentrification in yo' hood" thread... lol.

yah sorry about all that. i had just gotten home from work and was not too happy. and vanelist pissed me off. if you want ill delete it.

that was not directed to you in anyway. and i appreciate you educating people like me who do not think of los angeles as a manly artistic city.

[Elsongs]

Originally Posted by archd1

It's at 333 S. Hope St., Arco Center...that's what the website says but I haven't seen it myself....

It's now the BofA building.

[Vangelist]

quit being a dick...

i stated my opinion and i stand by it so fuck off<<

Haha - what's your is your botox starting to peel? I don't care if you call me names on here, but if you continue to post moronic statemets on here, I'll be compelled to correct them as long as I'm here

[Vangelist]

At the very least, don;'t post thing that are untrue, even if they are your "opinion" - no one gives a fuck about that, but when you start twisting facts, that's a problem. Don't embarrass the city on here - you're only going to give Chicagoans who troll here ammunition, particularly when you unfarly criticize LA out of ignorance

[godblessbotox]