State of the Art ’05

This special issue celebrates the ever-growing vibrancy and richness of the L.A. art scene. As Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum, notes in her interview, Los Angeles is now the world’s fourth art capital, along with New York, London and Berlin. In at least one area — new-media arts — Southern California is the world’s hub, thanks to the intersection of academic institutions and the film, music and gaming industries. Add renowned art schools, design and fashion and architecture, and (relatively) affordable housing (not to mention the weather), and it’s clear why, as Philbin says, students of those schools no longer move away upon graduation. They’re staying put and adding layer upon layer to this expanding universe. But how to cover it all?! It would be impossible to make note of each and every significant player in the L.A. art world. Thus the following list of artists (plus selected gallerists, curators and collectors) is representative rather than definitive. This year’s emerging artists, chosen by critic Doug Harvey, appear in a separate article, and are on exhibit through November 12 at Track 16 gallery in Bergamot Station. We expect to do this at least biennially in some form, so for all those deserving people not mentioned, there’s always the next time!

By Doug Harvey, Holly Myers, Peter Frank, Christopher Miles, Michael Duncan, Kristine McKenna and others as noted. The Rev. Ethan Acres Raised to be an evangelical preacher in his native Alabama, young Ethan Acres forsook the cloth to pursue his other calling — as a visual artist. By the time he emerged as the most multidimensional artist of the Vegas scene in the late ’90s, he had come full circle, getting ordained over the Internet, modifying a trailer into the first Highway Chapel, performing wildly original sermons, marriages and funerals, and producing enough curdled Christian Pop sculptures, paintings, photo works and crocheted goods to fill galleries in L.A., New York and London — where he preached at the Tate Modern, baptized Damien Hirst’s baby, and performed a modern-dance interpretation of the Fall on the Eve Club’s colored-glass hydraulic dance floor. Having relocated to L.A. for the new millennium, Acres kept up his grueling global schedule for several years, including star turns at Patricia Faure Gallery and Track 16 and an exorcism of the Santa Monica Museum. Unfortunately, many in the religio-phobic art world mistook his profound ambiguity for simplistic caricature. Feeling constricted by conventional art-world channels, the Reverend recently began withdrawing from his art-world affiliations and seeking ways to engage his public directly. While still traveling occasionally and speaking to students, Acres has been pouring his energies into a new version of the Highway Chapel — a pimped-out 1982 hearse this time — and negotiating the opening of his own church. “My new role model is Thomas Kinkade,” he says, laughing wickedly. “He really is!” (DH) Doug AitkenHe has made music videos, shot photographs, co-written a book (I Am a Bullet, with Dean Kuipers), and created Web-based artwork, but video installation is where Aitken has had the most impact, crafting visually stunning, spatialized semi-narratives attuned to a post-millennium need for new forms of time and space. (HW)

Doug Aitken, The Moment(2005) Courtesy Regen Projects

John Baldessari Genial giant John Baldessari is rightly considered one of the most influential artists of the past 35 years, having almost single-handedly invented the West Coast flavor of conceptual art. His witty, pared-down, semiotic object lessons on perceptual and cognitive conundrums were at their most distilled in his most recent body of work, Prima Facie, which pairs single words with appropriated images of human faces. (DH) Larry Bell After decades in Taos, Bell came home last year and slipped back into the Venice scene he helped create as a Chouinard grad in the early ’60s. He also helped create Finish Fetish and Light & Space art, Southern California’s answer(s) to minimalism, with his etched-mirror-glass, then just etched-glass boxes, moving on to glass almost imperceptibly tinted per a vacuum technique he’s applied to other media since, with equally luminous results. (PF) Maura Bendett, Narcissus(detail, 2005) Courtesy Roberts & Tilton Gallery Maura Bendett Bendett’s recent exhibition at Roberts & Tilton was the highlight of the spring gallery season. Master of the glue gun, she forms large, drippy wall concoctions of blossoms, thorns and pods that have their own fantastic biological life. With a painterly eye, she sculpts in color and form, making beautiful ornaments that have a living, breathing presence. (MD) Karl Benjamin Hard-Edge Abstraction began here — well, in Claremont. Benjamin was teaching there in 1959 when he was coupled with John McLaughlin, Lorser Feitelson and Frederick Hammersley in a show that went to Europe — where New York got wind of it. Benjamin had already been painting in cubism-derived geometric manners for a decade — and has worked thus ever since. In the process, he’s taught and influenced several generations of Southern Cal artists. (PF) Sandow Birk Birk’s epic In Smog and Thunder used a fictional war between north and south California to produce a torrent of gorgeous, scathing artworks. Since then he’s made angry and poignant work tackling federal prisons and the Rampart scandal. His latest series updates the social criticism of Dante for the Bush era. (See feature here.) (DH) Ginny Bishton Bishton’s feverish collages featuring thousands of minced snapshots of, say, all the food she ate in a year, or very low-altitude aerial shots from her daily walk, have always been dazzling showstoppers. Last year, she quit her day job and produced her most focused and extravagant photo mosaics yet. (DH) Black Dragon Society Black Dragon Society is the oldest Chinatown gallery still open, and it still isn’t putting on airs. Less a commercial venture than an effort of local art professors (mostly associated with UCLA) to provide an outlet to younger talents, it reflects the communitarian ideals that bespeak both those professors’ European roots and the L.A. art world’s own continuing camaraderie. So does the wild diversity of style, attitude and accomplishment. (PF) Chris Burden Many people focused on the irony of Burden quitting UCLA over a gun performance when he himself achieved overnight fame by having himself shot in the arm as a sculptural event. But for decades, Burden has eschewed the risky physical shtick for more mediated explorations of power structures — most recently through almost stately architectural and engineering models. (DH) Carole Caroompas Caroompas’ seething, reference-laden Technicolor canvases have a dark, confectionary seductiveness that should serve as fair warning to anyone who wants to tangle with them. In spite of their sheer retinal and pop-cultural overload, series like Psychedelic Jungle, the recent sortie into curdled exotica, pack a wry and subtle punk-feminist punch. (DH) Karen Carson With each show, Karen Carson confounds expectations, expanding her visceral examination of the interaction of nature and culture. Her recent paintings on silk of fires and windstorms in Western landscapes are cosmic tableaux that reveal the terror and comedy of the sublime — while offering a vehicle for her most virtuosic freeform drawing. Her new work debuts at the USC Fisher Gallery November 18. (MD) Center for Land Use Interpretation Matthew Coolidge, Erik Knutzen, Steve Rowell, Sarah Simons and the other creative minds behind Culver City's Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) continue to be active on several fronts, while maintaining a healthy distance from actual art-world entanglements. Two upcoming projects: an exhibition focusing on the tops and bottoms of mountains, and a profile of the Hudson River that will eventually go on permanent display in their new Troy, New York, facility. (DH) Photo by Sean Bonner Caryn Coleman and Sixspace “There’s no denying what’s happening here with art, but I resisted Culver City for so long, to me it was like the Valley without having to go over the hill,” says Caryn Coleman, having just moved her gallery, Sixspace, from downtown, mostly because of landlord issues. “I gave Chinatown a shot, but getting our business permit and stuff like that here was so easy, Culver City was like Mayberry.” So she and partner (and husband) Sean Bonner converted a warehouse near Susanne Vielmetter and Billy Shire Fine Art, just down from most of the other galleries that followed Blum & Poe about two years ago to the little no man’s land east of La Cienega. Sixspace has a reputation for attracting young collectors, their pockets heavy with disposable income from the movie and music industries, and young artists you can watch evolve before your eyes. Like its owner, who also runs the art.blogging.lasite, Sixspace is all over the map, showing installations, paintings, photography and works on paper. The gallery’s vibe is young, and Coleman has the youthful glow of a WB star. Then again, she is only 28. “I feel like in all of L.A. there’s this huge buzz and energy. Even New York writers and N.Y.-centric people I know are admitting that what’s happening here in L.A. is extremely vital,” she says as she pushes her long, dark hair behind her ears. “Culver City is definitely going to be the new Chelsea.” Coleman and Bonner recently put together a walking guide, a handy little gallery map, for navigating Culver’s nooks and crannies. It will need to be updated soon, as two more galleries just announced they’re planning to join the pack. “I don’t know if anybody would have predicted Culver City, but there’s a feeling here that we’re a part of something special that transcends the” — Coleman searches for the word — “commerce.” She smiles. “Kind of like we’re all part of history in this time period.” 5803 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 932-6200. (Linda Immediato) Robbie Conal Between teaching at USC, Getty panel discussions on Jacques Louis David, and his Weekly column “Artburn,” Conal still manages to execute nationwide guerrilla-postering campaigns that bring his scathing political caricatures — Dick Cheney the most recent victim — to thousands of people who never set foot in a gallery. (DH) Meg Cranston A 30-foot mountain of eggshells; a room full of life-size piñata self-portraits; a cone of mint-green ice cream, projected wall-size and melting in real time: The work of Meg Cranston is often oblique but big, striking and always memorable, built of history, memory, fantasy and allusion, and couched in an affable homespun style. (HM) Russell Crotty Crotty’s plainspoken ink renderings of planets and galaxies are the results of his backyard telescope observations. Bridging the gap between science and art, he measures and records the emotive power of the skyscape. Crotty defiantly claims his back yard as the center of the universe, his canyon’s horizon line as the edge of the world. Silhouettes of palm trees, oaks, satellite dishes, mansions, electrical pylons, outdoor sculpture and Winnebagos are silent and peripheral witnesses to one man’s heavenly manifestations. (MD) Georganne Deen Mothers and witches, lovers and wolves, doilies and paisleys, and flowers and snakes — the horrors of female adolescence, courted with trepidation and rendered with ruthless eloquence, run rampant in Georganne Deen’s delicate but sour and wonderfully sordid little paintings. Her piece Pluto's Pleasure graces one of our two covers this week. (HM) Roy DowellDowell’s local influence may come most apparently from his stewardship of Otis College’s graduate division. But it’s his collage rather than college connection that’s truly, enduringly persuasive, reaffiriming the tenets of modernism in a postmodernist milieu. Dowell’s pasted papers, and his paste-up approach to painting, conflate the billboard breadth of Pop art with the urgency and intimacy of early-20th-century collageomaniacs like the Dadaists and Futurists. (PF)