State Of Emergence

“State of Emergence” is the title of L.A. Weekly’s First Annual Biennial, an art show curated by Doug Harvey in conjunction with this issue. It, along with a selection of works by Weekly cover artists, is on view at Track 16 in Bergamot Station through November 12.

How does an art show get curated? Usually, some overpaid museum talent notices some kind of Zeitgeist — “Hmmm, I’m seeing a lot of art about persistive vegetative states. I think there’s something there!” Five years, 10 trips to Europe and uncountable free lunches later, we get “Persistive Vegetative States — The Exhibit!” Which is most likely a survey of people rich or cute enough to party with the big boys while calling themselves artists. This is what we had in mind for our First Annual Weekly Biennial. Unfortunately, it all started unraveling at the “overpaid” part and pretty much went downhill from there. “State of Emergence” was pieced together in less than two months on an artist-run-space budget, so there wasn’t time for much deliberation, let alone luncheon junkets. The premise of the show — an event to correspond to the L.A. theater and music awards the Weekly dispenses annually — set the initial parameters. Instead of a “greatest hits of the past year” package, though, we thought it would be more fun and less insurance to present a range of works from more-or-less unknown L.A. artists.

The greatest resource for unknown artists in L.A. is, of course, its many schools. While the premature exhibitionism rampant in the art world is a sore point for many — I myself have railed against it in print on more than one occasion — it occurs to me that probably 75 percent of the really good grad-school artists I’ve met over the past decade have disappeared within a couple of years of graduating. So if they aren’t robbed from the cradle, their art never gets exposed to a wider public, and we’re all the poorer for it. And, frankly, the benefits of grad school amount to a) time in the studio and b) networking. It’s rare for someone to leave grad school with any more talent than they walked in with. What I’m saying is you either got it or you don’t. Art degrees mean nothing.

Luckily, young artists don’t know this fact, and continue to conveniently flock to these centralized showroom clearing-houses, where parasitical Svengalis such as myself can graze with impunity and a minimal expenditure of energy. Still, just a little more than half of the artists in the main gallery are still in graduate school, and only two of the video artists are. There’s plenty of unknown to go around, even outside the academy.

In spite of time and money constraints, the show grew in an organic and cohesive way, like a painting. Once a couple of artists are chosen, the elements begin to form themselves into different, shifting configurations. Each new addition clicks into place or it doesn’t — significance can be analyzed later. In the meantime, the show takes on a life of its own — a gestalt consciousness almost. Soon the works begin communicating with one another, achieving self-determination and turning on their human masters in an orgy of blood sacrifice and deconstructionism. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

What are some of the correspondences that emerge from this particular constellation of artworks? Perhaps the most prominent commonality is a wave of new relation to popular culture, characterized by a collage sensibility that sometimes borders on atomization. This manifests itself most literally in the bristling constructions of Elliott Hundley, which occupy some territory between the seething horror vacuii collages of the late Bay Area beatnik Jess and Oyvind Fahlstrom’s magnetic variable paintings. The exquisite immediacy of this recent UCLA MFA grad’s pincushion mosaics is testified to by the feverish flurry of serious gallery interest described in a recent New York Times story. From a distance, Hundley’s work resembles gorgeous abstract painting, but on close inspection is revealed as an intricate aggregation of tiny elements, typically pinned individually to the surface like so many butterfly-hunting trophies. Tiny cut-out photographic images and illustrations from children’s encyclopedias swirl together with sequins and fragments of artificial flowers like some magical Stevie Nicks cape, creating an almost overwhelming wash of interchangeable narrative particles adding up to a story as dizzying and complex as modern life, and mercifully, optimistically beautiful.

Brian Bess, Wall (2005)

Hundley’s longtime colleague Brian Bress, still in the UCLA grad program, creates work that finds the world less sweet, but much funnier. Visually complex and formally accomplished, Bress’ modified appropriations (a found painting of an old man praying, for instance, with Bress’ addition of a hovering tadpole entity) tread even further into the realm of questionable taste, using soothing environmental photo-murals and inspirational thrift-store posters as grounds for quasi-modernist interventions or as backdrops for his mesmerizing what-the-fuck?! performance videos.

Sarah Cromarty also trawls the thrift stores for uplifting scenic posters — rainbows, hot-air balloons, fireworks — for use in her sweetly sinister paintings. Growing out of earlier bodies of work that made somewhat more clinical modifications to thrift-store paintings and the covers of nature books, her double-glazed confections somehow combine the irresistible sublime of Caspar David Friedrich with the unhinged Hallmark sentiment of "Deep Thoughts with Jack Handy." An Art Center BFA grad, Cromarty is a studio assistant to Jim Shaw and appeared as a spirit girl in Marnie Weber’s recently mounted rock opera Songs That Never Die.