May 25, 2007

"Eden's Edge: Fifteen L.A. Artists," Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA,

A butterfly is an apt metaphor for Eden’s Edge: Fifteen LA Artists, curated by Gary Garrels for the Hammer Museum: fluttery and vulnerable, the work is skittish and fragile; lovely to behold, with a trajectory that could only be described by string theory, it rewards close-up looks and far-away ganders; clustered on walls like butterflies massed on a tree, it’s ephemeral, process-oriented, and poised for flight.

Too bad it doesn’t sting like a bee.

Garrels suggests that postlapsarian Los Angeles has joined the ranks of historical metropolises because its artists confront their “existential condition” in all its multivalent grandeur. True, to a point. More likely, though, it has attained that rank because finally we can write of Los Angeles art as having a pedigree longer than it takes someone to get an MA from Cal Arts, a one-person show, and tenure all in one year.

It’s a historical show: the holy trinity is Pittman, Jim Shaw, and Ken Price, residents of the first three galleries; and then come the twelve acolytes, each with their own shrine, of which more later.

Familial resemblances are vague (material, craft, process); since it’s a multi-media show, the similarities rest more in attitude. The show’s general tenor isn’t so much one of dystopia and dysfunction (or peachy-keenness) as one of gridlock and resignation. Walking through the galleries you don’t get a sense of bravura or cock-certainty; any trace of modernist destiny has been thrown out the window like an In-n-Out burger bag. Though it begins and ends with a bang, bookended by a large Lari Pittman and the exquisite Jason Rhoades neon installation, the narrative reads more like a big “Whatever!” with a subtitle of “The Apotheosis of a Tempest in a Teacup,” of which more later.

Garrels wants us to experience the simultaneity, the instability, and the alloverness of the Angeleno experience as refracted through the art on display. As evidence he adduces work that sprawls and diffuses; work that is obsessive and ephemeral; work that exists on simultaneous planes and references the flicker of anachronistic celluloid and passing scenery.

So far, so good. The best pieces in the show are those that oscillate and quiver, unwilling to be pinned down. Elliott Hundley’s whimsical “Cave” is a tumbleweed wreath he fashions from plastic, pins, and a magnifying glass; it looks ephemeral but, made from mostly non-biodegradable materials, it’s will just rest on that junkyard heap. Jim Shaw’s “Dream Object” shows nineteen scenes of businessmen whose faces melt and morph a la Hockney, Bacon, and Gris, into a hedge of pornographic images, which nicely references Parthenon figures.

Other pieces sprawl across the wall but are punctuated with patches of obsession. Matt Greene’s “By the Lust of the Basidiomycetes (that’s fungi and spores) Shall Every Perversion Be Satisfied” shows a roiling, light-diffused surface pockmarked with eddies of porn. In Lari Pittman’s “Once a Noun, Now a Verb, #2” a figure (noun) fluidly levitates (verb) through multiple planes and panes of particular times and places. Though Jason Rhoades’ magisterial “Twelve-Wheel Waggon Wheel Chandelier” commands a huge patch of ceiling, its interest resides in those hanging tendrils of lace and those skewed neon flash cards that illuminate fragments of platitudes and ads. We may have dined at Judy Chicago’s but Rhoades hosted the apres-party.

Other work suggests spores, which suggests viral proliferation and process. Ken Price’s Zigzag, looks like a pod that hopscotches up and down the evolutionary cycle. Rebecca Morales’s Triad, a precious gouache, watercolor, ink, and pastel on calf vellum, looks like something that grows on meat left out in the sun as seen under a microscope. Ditto for Ginny Bishton’s Lavender and Yellow; it looks like something that skirts across a Petri dish, seemingly innocuous but portends a potent biological hazard.

A few issues, however, undercut Mr. Garrels’ considerable and mostly positive effort. First, the vision thing. Garrels writes that Los Angeles has joined the ranks of historical cultural centers. Fine (and finally), huzzah! But what’s the city’s image he wants to project to the rest of the world? Is it something we can wear with pride on our sleeves as we otherwise try to slip anonymously through customs masquerading as a Canadian? No. If this show is any indication, we are Angstless in Teflonville, It’s the state motto equivalent of “Oklahoma is OK.”

As bodacious as Mr. Garrels’ choice of work and exhibition title may be, his essay doesn’t introduce anything new into the LA canon as much as it rehashes the same “false dichotomies” and “clichés” that he references if not derides a catalogue essay for the recent “The Sunshine & Noir” exhibition.

Citing our propensity for earthquakes, our flickering freeway vistas gleaned from moving cars, and our media environment, Garrels writes “there is no other city that shares all the formative factors that make Los Angeles.” With the exception of the absolute specifics of geography and architecture, not true. I vouchsay the same could be said for Beijing, Bombay, and Berlin. I also suspect that he commutes off hours and against the traffic because fractured views from speeding cars are few and far between.

The one glaring omission in his essay is a discussion of the effect of world-shrinking, hierarchy-smashing technology on the work; though I suspect that in so doing he would blow his Angeleno-centric premise. He also writes of a bi-coastal dichotomony...”Art in California has never had the cool intellectualism of art in New York...” forgetting that Los Angeles alone does not define California art.

Whether it’s digital manipulation of images, the non-hierarchal casserole fusion of the local and the global, or the phenomena of Second Life, the virtual Third Place (home, work, Second Life), failure to discuss much less broach implications doesn’t tell the full story.

Ultimately, though, what deflates the show is its installation. Garrels writes with incision and clarity about the works’ feedback loop of stability and morphosis. If that’s the most salient point of the show (it is), then why does he academicize each artist with his or her separate gallery? Why can’t the children dine with the adults? If he wants to show how matters cultural simmer in a menudo of indeterminacy, why stake each out artist in isolation? The result is not so much a body of work that flounces its flux but a show that herkily jerks like stop-and-go traffic: you get nowhere, you waste time, and you get brain-freeze.

Museum hours are 11am – 7pm, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, 11am – 9pm, Thursday, 11am – 5pm, Sunday. The show runs until September 2. Tickets are $3-5. The Museum is located at 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. For more information call (310) 443-7020 or visit www.hammer.ucla.edu