LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: NUMBER 41

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." 

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.

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. 

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: NO. 33

One terrific advantage of being a New York critic in L.A. is that you are automatically endowed with advantages that would be unimaginable in the brawling, hip-checking, high-paced competitive intellectual world  of Manhattan.

As a visiting writer I was entitled, together with a very intimate circle of about 200 international colleagues, to preview the LA Convention Center's LA Art Show of 2014.

At the risk of alienating the local scribes who by contract were banned from the pre-pre-preview I would like to offer a brief assessment of this West Coast grand bizarre of pictures, statues and prints.

My choice of words are deliberate for though the event is billed as an "art show," the format resembles more a county fair than a cathedral of culture. Lacking even the slightest pretense toward gravity or high mindedness the tin chorus of cubicles are filled with what can only be described as potential components of snazzy interior design. That the investment potential of these baubles is foregrounded by the participants never for a moment dispels the obvious neutrality of the works at hand.

Gliedmann no.11, Lars GroßesJuwel, 2013

Even the controversial Berlin based artist, Lars GroßesJuwel's monumental steel sculpture Gliedmann no.11 was tamed by its surroundings. Measuring close to 35 feet in height and 120 feet in length, the work was situated just outside the center's South Hall J. I must say that in the bright southern Californian light it looked more like a dismantled billboard than a disruptive "interplay of irony and subversion."*

It's fair to note one notable but qualified exception. Toward the back of Hall K in booth number 61a5 - shared by the Vienna based gallery Malen nach Zahlen and L.A.'s Torn Curtain - is an interesting project by the local artist Dahlia Danton. Metro Stations of the Cross consists of 347 small drawings of churches, cathedrals and monasteries throughout Athens and its environs.

Metro Stations of the Cross no. 212, Dahlia Danton 2013

 With funds from the Hellenic Center of Arts and Culture and the Orange County Martial Fund Danton traveled to Greece to document every Christian house of worship within striking distance of public transportation. This impressive project was thwarted when Danton was severely stricken with food poisoning but she did manage to nearly complete the Athenian leg of her journey.

I was so taken by the work that as soon as I was done with the dim task of writing about the fair for Dolphy Cane's Vernissage Magazine, I hopped on a plane for Mykonos where I'm defering the churches in favor of the beaches and the pubs.

*From the catalog essay by Los Angeles critic Frank Gilui 

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: NO. 29

Up until a few months ago, my familiarity with the work of Cuban artist Micah Carpentier was casual at best. Though very much a part of the standard Latin American art historical narrative, his stature has always been dimmed by the legends of Siqueiros, Orozco and Rivera. Attempts to correct this traditional misjudgement have been feeble at best.

from The Song of Degrees, Micah Carpentier, 1971 (courtesy of the Carpentier Foundation, Madrid)

It has been my great good fortune to have recently made the acquaintance of Carpentier's nephew Roberto Carpentier-Katz . A native of Puerto Rico, Carpentier-Katz divides his time between Manhattan and Madrid where he directs the Carpentier Foundation. His is a labor of love since the Rivera-Kahlo lobby has done everything in their power to suppress or diminish his uncle's legacy.  

I made a special trip to Spain in order to research the Carpentier archive as part of a book I am writing about the relationship between Roberto Bolaño, José Bañón and Micah Carpentier and I was astounded by what I saw.

Aside from the remarkable work, the press clippings alone added up into a veritable bildungsroman of hope, triumph and crushing despair, a dispiriting story worthy of the most tragic of operas.

Nonetheless I came away fairly ebullient. How often does one discover for oneself new source of cultural caché? Few of my hipster colleagues in Brooklyn had ever heard of Carpentier. My editor, Dolphy Cane thinks there isn't much of a story here and my girl friend who is an adjunct professor of Latin American Literature is stubbornly convinced that the whole thing is a hoax.

Which is all fine with me. I will bask in my uniqueness for a little while longer while I wait for the world to catch up.

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK NO.21

There's been a lot of grumbling of late among the mob. Much has been made of the supposed distinction between the 'art world' and the 'art market.' It's easy to deflate a balloon if you've never been aloft.

Unless you claim to be a creationist you must recognize that artists like lemurs and chimpanzees perish if nature deems them unfit.

I was in attendance at the recent auctions in New York and I can tell you that the atmosphere was electric! Those folks with the silver cufflinks are the real art lovers. Waiting in line and dropping a twenty to see a few Magrittes is patty-cake compared to what I saw the other night.

Face it, it's been years since post-modernism successfully defanged formalism of its supreme authority in determining quality and worth. Is it my fault that they forgot to replace it with something else? The market which is much more savvy in the strategies of survival quickly stepped in to fill the void.

Explain to me what exactly is wrong with money being the arbiter of value? It works with oil futures and durable goods. Why shouldn't it work with paintings?

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK NO. 19:

The art world is awash with fabulous fraud. The auction houses peddle piddling trifles for millions of dollars with scant regard for authenticity or provenance. The recent disclosures regarding the rampant and clumsy forgeries that are flooding the Chinese market come as no surprise to the few remaining dinosaurs who still value the cute sentimental rigors of connoisseurship, discernment, quality and depth.

The age of mechanical reproduction is a thrashing monsoon of monotonous accessibility. 

With two quick clicks one can instantly actualize The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb and The Exaltation of the Lip Syncing Man reducing them both into what Silicon Valley euphemistically calls "visual assets."

Even our most gifted artists are compromised by this Benjaminian dystopia. A recent show at Méchant Mec, the New York gallery specializing in what has come to be known as SoCal Neo-DaDa, exhibited a series of oil paintings by Los Angeles artist David Schoffman that were fabricated in workshops in Seoul, South Korea according to specifications communicated strictly through Twitter. In an apparent concession to the realities of global marketing, Schoffman has agreed to the unlicensed franchising of three of his most recognizable images. These more affordable facsimiles are now available in galleries and selected boutiques in Asia and the Arabian Peninsula.

And so it must be. 

Walter Benjamin's final resting place in Portbou has the following epitaph inscribed on his gravestone: "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." 

Grab on to your portable electronic devices, strap yourselves in and watch as we scroll our way into the abyss . . .

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK NO. 14

Two incredibly different but equally challenging exhibitions opened this week in Berlin.  Readymades and Jeremiads at Kunststinkt and Reconfiguring the Generic: Mutual Blackness and the Aesthetics of Race Bias at the Museum der Alltäglich Plattitüden on Rykestrasse, suitably situated down the block from Germany's largest synagogue.

I'm here in Deutschland working on a piece for Vernissage, Dolphy Cane's relatively new Los Angeles art magazine which tries to focus on what he calls "serious cultural criticism." It's a tough standard to maintain these days since the art world, like politics has become a kind of show business for ugly people.

While the readymades show was a straight up critique of post-colonial contemporary studio practice within the asymmetrical Western generative art market, Mutual Blackness was something a bit more idiosyncratic.

Ruthless Bluster, Cissé Diab, 2012. Tar, sand, burlap and coconut shells of sheet metal

Most of the participating artists are fairly well-established figures whose recognizable styles seem artificially altered to fit the theme of the exhibition. Though far from unusual, in this particular instance there is a serendipitous consequence that is far from disagreeable. 

The works are like strange non-sequitars or fragments of conversations accidentally over heared on the street. We are forced by the sheer weight of the show's title to force a specific narrative and meaning to the otherwise arbitrary assembly of paintings, sculptures and video installations.

For me it was fun. I can only imagine what the Germans thought.

Spark Boon: SEVENTY-SIX