There's a very special West Coast form of domesticated cool. Every time I visit a gallery, art museum or art fair in
southern California I imagine opening up a micro-brewery or inventing
some new recipe for double-yeast artisanal egg bread.
Don't get me wrong. Living the past four years in Williamsburg I'm no stranger to countercultural commodification. Together with black and white cookies, onion bagels and pizza, branding bohemia is something of a New York City specialty.
But there's something about the Pacific Ocean that bevels any edge that might survive among the fringe.
I was recently in Los Angeles covering yet another Art Fair, this one taking place in an impossibly lit former airport hanger in Santa Monica. I was reminded of Duchamp's famous complaint about the redundant beauty of nature. Every single work in that overly capacious space looked, smelled and tasted like "Art."
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| Beastiality XXI, Youseff Zved, 2014 |
From Youseff Zved's Beastiality paintings to Maristella Lvov's 'Redwood' holograms the walls were replete with that icy self-consciousness of hip, academic detachment. Even Eckel Moonse's typically transgressive videos looked like infomercials as they were projected in high definition on monumental razor-thin liquid crystal screens.
One notable exception was the work of the Paris-based artist Currado Malaspina. His new series of large works on paper, taxonomie dix-Neuf, are sly, private, poetic enigmas that deal with the arbitrary coding of language and the proto-humanization of signs.
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| taxonomie dix-Neuf N.14, Currado Malaspina, 2013 |
Malaspina's hot flame of disjunctive ambiguity felt conspicuously out of place hung next to the cool chic work of his contemporaries. But then again, Currado has always been such a square.
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