LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: No. 121

I've been on the West Coast covering the art scene in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. 

Here's a summery of the best L.A. had to offer this month:

 On the Westside, Chi-Ann Briggs animates the

The Wound That Seduces, Chi-Ann Briggs, 2014

will against itself with a sprawling installation that pits memory with an almost alpine effort at self-sublimation. Her first one-woman show at Galax Turnkey in Culver City signals the emergence of an eccentric talent whose use of language at the service of the destabilization of meaning has the potential for redefining poetic space in a post-sculptural ecosystem.

Tamara Udon by contrast, takes the idea of conventional meaning systems quite literally. Her show at Montrose Lucida at the Pacific Design Center focuses on fluid narrative structures filtered through the prism of reality television script doctoring. 

  

Tell It To Me Again, Tamara Udon, 2013

With the use of documentary footage, Udon's videos place the question of dis-identity in the foreground of an architectural reification at the expense of a deliberately disruptive impersonation of authenticity. Though much of the work is difficult to watch, repeated viewings are generally rewarded with the subtle complexities of its baroque format.

Palm #2213, Gary Mint 2002 -2014

Gary Mint's Encyclopedia of Palms is probably one ot the most interesting shows I've seen in Los Angeles in a long time. Compiled over a twelve year period, Mint set out to document every palm tree in Los Angeles County. As most astute viewers know but what few tourists care to admit is that the tree that is commonly associated with Beverly Hills is not indigenous to the region. Imported from New Zealand, the trees thrive in spite of their dislocation. By carefully chronicling every example of this trans-continental graft Mint calls attention to a form of vegetative immigration as a proxy for our own condition of urban alienation. 

The work can be seen at Lover's Lane in West Hollywood. 

All three exhibitions are examples of the growing ingenuity and self-confidence of an emerging group of Southern Californian artists who have bartered their expensive M.F.A.'s for a more sophisticated, less academic relationship to post-post modernism.

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: Number 101

The agon is as old as the agora and just as tiger fish swallow the minnow so too with artists. It is a time honored tradition for the graves of the so-called masters to be desecrated by pretenders to the throne. That some are not merely pretenders, only history can arbitrate, but among the living, artistic insurrections are a blood sport like no other.

Basil Zukofsky in his Greenpoint studio 2014

Take the case of Basil Zukofsky, the twenty-five year old enfant terrible of the M.F.A. postpartum set. While still at Yale he reportedly infuriated his professors by scheduling his extensive New York exhibitions in May, making his work unavailable for the semester's final review. "Don't worry," he once told a dumbstruck adjunct, "The Times said the work was fine."

The Recovery of Beauty, acrylic on masonite, Basil Zukofsky, 2014

There is no denying that Zukofsky has talent, his recent offerings at Volta NY were evidence enough of his raw and visceral abilities. Ideas, of course, are a different story. Some find it perfectly acceptable when an artist openly usurps another's concepts and makes it their own but most would agree that outright, unabashed larceny is an unpardonable offense even among thieves.

The overworked axiom that there is no such thing as bad publicity never seemed more justified when it was revealed that Zukofsky's monumental The Recovery of Beauty a 24 foot wide behemoth of allusion and appropriation was in fact a mere enlargement of Los Angeles painter David Schoffman's earlier and more intimate The Architect's Will.

The Architect's Will, oil on linen, David Schoffman 2003

Zukofsky shrugged off the allegations implausibly explaining that any similarity to Schoffman's work was merely coincidental. Citing the unconscious imprint of Ronnie Mack's She's So Fine on George Harrison's My Sweet Lord, the young painter claimed he was innocent of outright imitation. 'Inanimate homage' was the phrase he (or his legal team) coined to explain the uncanny similarities. The ensuing scandal only elevated Zukofsky's stock while the elder statesman Schoffman was depicted in the press as a bitter curmudgeon attempting to awkwardly bask in the young art star's reflected phosphorescence.

And so while Zukofsky's Recovery of Beauty adjusts to its new climate controlled surroundings in the Latif Pavillion of Contemporary Art in Dubai Schoffman's Architect is probably still languishing in some dark corner of the Beverly Hills home of Gina and Howard Rakosi where it has quietly resided for over a decade.

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: No. 77

The flight from New York to Paris is just a couple of hours longer than the flight to L.A. so when my editor gave me the choice of covering Art Los Angeles Contemporary or the Paris/Nice bicycle race it was, as they say in neighboring Belgium a pas de cerveau (trans. 'no brainer'). 

What I know about bicycle racing barely extends beyond what I've picked up peddling along the Manhattan waterfront with my regular posse of stock analysts and security traders. They told me to watch Germany's John Degenkolb and that while in Paris I should go to Dominique Bouchet and make sure to order the rack of lamb. I mention this to illustrate just how out of touch the Wall Street crowd is from the rest of us. To think that someone who makes a living writing art criticism would spend sixty bucks on a piece of meat even if it did come with polenta is more evidence than I'll ever need to see just how insulated these guys are.

But the sad and indisputable fact remains that it is they, my buddies in their ridiculous lycra bicycle tights, who are closer to the pulse of the art world than I'll ever be.

While sharing a couple of fabulous bottles of Pouilly Fumé with some Italian sportswriters I was reminded of just how marginal we arts professionals are with our expensive graduate degrees and fancy specializations. Here in Magny-Cours where the race just completed its third stage nothing could be further from the world of ideas. My Italian colleagues are bemused at best at the thought that someone would be willing to shell out 36 million euros on a stainless steel balloon dog. To them it's just another symptom of the madness of money. What gets them impressed (and their astonishment is truly contagious) is when a man can cycle over 1500 kilometers in a week's time and not collapse into a coma.  

Right before I left, my buddy Nathan, a market maker at Nyx Securities (can someone please tell me what a market maker makes) bought a small sculpture at an art fair in Madrid. It's by a young Catalan artist named Eddie Jiro who though well known in Europe is just beginning to make a name for himself in New York.

Probar mis Calzoncillos, mixed media, Eddie Jiro 2014

Without batting an eye, Nat paid 74,000 euro.

He thinks it was a bargain.

I did the research.

He's right.

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: No. 68

The fine art of photography is a frail craft crushed under the democratizing weight of the smart phone.

Only cataracted conservatives and technology infatuated Tories would deny this lamentable yet incontrovertible reality. For years we've been tipped off by Webster's with their recent inclusion of the term 'visual asset' as a feeble futuristic synonym for the word 'picture.'

One notable exception is the work of the French Canadian artist Jean-Marie Mikita.

Cecilia of Les Andelys, Ciba-Gel chrome print on linen, Jean-Marie Mikita 2013

Mikita's work, well-known for years in the francophone world, has only recently come to the critical attention of the New York art press. With his ironic meta-narrative critiques of the medium itself, the work bounces and distorts like a series of fun house mirrors steeped in Lacanian jouissance.  

Cecilia of Les Andelys which I recently saw in an exhibition at Fortune & Price, is a billiard table of rebounding references that call to mind the monumental still-lives of George Braque.

Mikita is certainly a talent worth watching. Whether he can remain vital while using the fossilized medium of photography is still an open question.