LA Weekly

One of the most pronounced symptoms of the wide-scale institutionalization of artistic practice has been the rise of curatorial studies as an academic category and the subsequent escalation of the curator’s role and visibility — sometimes to the point of supplanting the place of the artist as the raison d’être of an exhibition. Occasionally this inversion is justified, but more often it stands as sad and stunted evidence of the blahblahblah-ification of what is essentially a complex preverbal multisensory language; just because a picture’s worth a thousand words doesn’t mean those words demand to be spelled out.

At best, this confusion results in awkward visual treatises on this or that academic buzz-concept of the month with vaguely relevant artwork shoehorned into kinky theoretical go-go boots that squeeze in all the wrong places. At worst, it elevates artifacts and practices that have no function outside their role as props in squalid internecine squabbles for tenure and trustee bucks (good only within the walls of the theme park). The layers of hedging demanded by the professional art-world mindset make it almost impossible for curators to be truly creative in their work — to let their inspiration, enthusiasm, intuition and subjective personal taste dictate the content of a show, allowing the post hoc rationalizations to fall as they may.

Which is why it is such a great and unexpected pleasure to come across a museum show like “Eden’s Edge,” a sampler of 15 contemporary Los Angeles artists assembled by the Hammer’s recently promoted chief curator, Gary Garrels. Garrels is no stranger to auteur curation, but for “Eden’s Edge” he allowed the concept to develop from the bottom up. There’s plenty of thematic continuity and consonance — most of the work is either figurative or landscape-oriented, much of it grapples with the high/low cultural schism, many seem to capture and freeze moments of seething fragmentary flux, and virtually all are psychedelic both in a formal sense and in their capacity to simultaneously encompass darkly obsessive and blissfully luminous psychological and spiritual content.

But these concepts are deeply and inextricably embedded in the actual work, and the best argument that this represents a distinctly Angeleno strain of contemporary visual language is the show itself. Garrels made the wise choice to organize the work into autonomous parcels — essentially 15 gallery-size miniretrospectives, with chronological succession as the only narrative conceit. Beginning with the sumptuous 1990s biomorphic ceramic oozings of ’60s legend Ken Price (talk about psychedelic — if you sit too close to them, you’ll ruin your eyes!) and ending more or less with the flickering specimen fields of Elliott Hundley (who graduated from UCLA in 2005), each artist is given the space to build up an approximate decade’s worth of internal synergy before linking up to the big picture.

In some cases, this can be a tremendous benefit. I was impressed with Mark Bradford’s work when I first saw it at Watts Towers Arts Center in 2000, but lost interest as subsequent shows seemed to recycle the novelty medium of collaged hair-permanent end papers without displaying any formal growth. But the group of Bradford’s recent works in “Eden’s Edge” is dazzling, thanks to a dramatic turning up of the contrast over the last couple of years, resulting in a corresponding increase in textural and compositional complexity, overlaying hard-edged graphic design on what was a somewhat mushy impressionism and transforming it into something new and remarkable.

Similarly, Liz Craft’s first solo show — a closed-circuit sculptural installation called “Living Edge” that could stand as the absent signature piece of this exhibit — was a qualified knockout, but many of her infrequent later inclusions in L.A. group shows came off as relative one-liners. It wasn’t until her second L.A. solo show seven years later — a crowd of hippie-kitschy “hairy guys” occupying Peres Projects — that it became readily apparent that Craft had emerged from the shadow of Jennifer Pastor as an important and singular L.A. voice.

The key in this case is the “seven years” thing — Craft’s tour-de-force Death Rider (Virgo)— a wooden iron horse cast in bronze, straddled by Death and a phantom biker chick — may be familiar to those who made it to the 2004 Whitney Biennial. But it, like so much of the important art that is made here, has never been exhibited in L.A. Another example is Matthew Monahan, whose awkwardly elegant dry-wall pedestal-mounted mash-ups of previous works and intricately symmetrical stoner transfer-paper monoprints have been causing a stir back East and in Amsterdam; he doesn’t even have a gallery here.

This is a collateral benefit of “Eden’s Edge” — the chance to see works that were never exhibited here, like Jason Rhoades’ Twelve-Wheel Waggon Wheel Chandelier (a 2004 substitute for a new work the deceased artist was planning for the Hammer’s vault gallery), which was shown previously in Switzerland, or Monica Majoli’s recent breakthrough series of large-scale washy watercolors depicting suspended rubber enthusiasts, which debuted at last year’s Whitney. On the other end of the fame scale, Rebecca Morales — whose odd gouache-on-calf-vellum floral studies look like needlecraft projects from a parallel universe — has exhibited locally only at the militantly figurative Koplin Del Rio gallery. And I’d never even heard of the quirky video-artist team of Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn.

Other selections give a second chance to see work that may have been overlooked — Ginny Bishton’s fabulous Walking Drawing photo-collages because Richard Telles stubbornly refuses to relocate from Beverly Boulevard to one of the art malls, or Elliott Hundley’s pincushion-palette-turned-artwork Deathless Aphrodite of the Spangled Mind, which showed briefly in a group show at Overtones Gallery while Hundley was in his first year at grad school, and got snapped up by Fred Hoffman. In its “Eden’s Edge” configuration, Hundley’s Aphrodite is fleshed out — or refracted, rather — by the presence of four other works that split its spectral sweep into more focused monochromatic pictorial inventories, making apparent a strong overlap with Bishton’s masterful attention to color — over and above their penchant for cutting out tiny little bits of photographs and sticking them down.

These are the kind of synchronicities that arise when you let the art do the talking. There are some curious oversights — Anna Sew Hoy’s funky clay Scholar Rocks and Dreamcatcher are engaging enough and dovetail neatly with the adjacent revivalist kitsch of Liz Craft, but the spectacularly filigreed tree stumps of her Broken Arm series would have linked up in an additional two or three directions. I can think of a half-dozen other painters working the same multiple-naked-people-inserted-in-barely-adequate-pseudo-German-bad-painting routine as Matt Greene, to similarly negligible effect. Much as I’m emotionally attracted to her highly crafted black-light visionary mysticism, I’m still not convinced that Sharon Ellis is a major artist, though both these artists’ work seems more substantial in this company.

Such unfortunate divergences from my taste are more than offset by punchy mini-surveys of Lari Pittman’s queasily exquisite canvases and Jim Shaw’s dream-derived paperback covers, monumental Ganesha sculpture, and a suite of drawings that mulches the corpus of capitalism into a Dionysian hedge-orgy. But of course my taste isn’t the point. “Eden’s Edge” succeeds as a representation of contemporary art in Los Angeles not because Garrels’ choices were correct, but because they were personal. Which, when you get down to it, is all any curator really has to offer that isn’t already in the art.


EDEN’S EDGE: Fifteen L.A. Artists | The Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. | Through September 2

More images from the Hammer Museum's show, Eden's Edge

Tom Christie's interview with The Hammer's Gary Garrels