3. JIM SHAW at Patrick Painter, and MARNIE WEBER, “Sleepy Weepy Stories,” at Rosamund Felsen Gallery
The strength of these almost simultaneous shows by two of Los Angeles‘ most idiosyncratic pop-surrealist masters becomes almost unfathomable when you consider the work was done in the midst of an all-consuming collaborative project -- the artists’ infant daughter, Colette. Overcoming their baby‘s colic to operate at the peak of their skills, both artists served up their strongest shows in recent memory -- Shaw with a generous batch of mutant-kitsch art objects re-created deadpan from his dreams, Weber with a breakthrough series of larger-scaled photo-collages and two multimedia sculptures rippling with phantasmagoria of sexually charged, wounded funny-animal antics tapping the feverish dark side of childhood. That kid’s got her work cut out.
2. TIM HAWKINSON, Pentecost at ACE
The metastasizing imagination of Tim Hawkinson reached a new plateau of unwieldiness back East this year with an airplane-hangar-size player-pianobagpipe contraption called Uberorgan at MASS MOCA. Angelenos were not deprived, though, as Hawkinson finally graced us with Pentecost, a huge faux-finish Yggdrasil affixed with a Last Supper‘s worth of simulacral drummer boys modeled after the artist’s recurring “bathtub-generated” topographical self-portrait. Combining the innovative spatial programming of his earlier inflatable latex self-portrait systems with a simultaneously arresting and soothing audio environment, Hawkinson conjured a hilariously futile jungle telegraph of unintelligible percussive crosstalk, with a wealth of unforced cognitive and spiritual connotations lurking just under its entertaining surface.
1. BRUCE CONNER at MOCA
This non-retrospective of psychedelic daddy-o Conner‘s mind-boggling (combined with fellow Bay Area renaissance dude William Wiley’s watercolors and sculptures at L.A. Louver, a serious dose indeed) forays into assemblage, painting, drawing, printmaking, collage, photograms and film is a model for the presentation of such a wide-ranging oeuvre, thanks in no small part to the artist‘s own insistence on the soundproof enclosure of the three small theaters included. From his hugely influential sculptural clusters of discarded cultural minutiae and separately but equally substantial contribution to experimental filmmaking, to his little-known attempts at bodily disintegration through silver-nitrate alchemy, Conner, through his sharply focused oscillation between literal and conceptual black-and-whites, unleashes not the expected haze of gray, but a torrent of fractal possibilities that continues to inspire, even decades after the fact.
