Hi Good Free in Torrance Friday!

As part of the new programming at the Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles based artist/curator/critic Doug Harvey has selected Lee Lynch's film titled "Ned's Draw" -- a neo-revisionist True Crime Western -- as the inaugural installment of the TAM's new film series. The film will be supplemented with live acting and an installation. 
Doug has also selected a new short by Eric Wright & Cathy Ward titled "Passing" which is narrated by LM Kit Carson who wrote Paris, Texas.

Los Angeles artists Gustavo Herrera & Spencer Douglass will kick off the evening with their piece "Buffalo Mierda".

Friday, June 19, 2009
8:00pm
Torrance Art Museum
3320 Civic Center Dr.
Torrance, CA
90509

MAP

GLOW Girls à Go-Go in the OC!

"The impression most people have of the history and meaning of 20th-century abstract painting basically involves a bunch of can-do postwar East Coast American dudes systematically stripping away subjective frills such as “content” to arrive at the monochromatic squares and precise geometric diagrams of Minimalism and Conceptualism, which allegedly refer to nothing outside themselves.

I’m not sure if any of the actual artists in question would subscribe to this version of history, but it has nonetheless seeped into the surface levels of our collective cultural consciousness, effectively burying a deeper and more complex story — a story less about real men optimizing the efficiency of the decoration industry and more about a bunch of middle-aged ladies wandering the desert in search of transcendental light.

However glossed over in the interests of secular technophilia, this alternate account of the significance of capital-A Abstraction keeps bubbling up, most elegantly in 2005’s 3 x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin (possibly the best show ever hosted by the Santa Monica Museum of Art) but perhaps most emphatically in LACMA’s 1986 exhibit (and exhaustive catalog) The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985. Aside from af Klint, one of my personal revelations from that show was local mystic Agnes Pelton, who spent her most productive years in Palm Springs–adjacent Cathedral City, painting luminous, symmetrical conflations of the natural and inner landscapes that teeter between geometric decoration and symbolic illustration; between sumptuous formal design and painting deployed as a tool for entering (and prompting) altered states of consciousness.

After experiencing the disproportionate presence manifested by Pelton’s Sandstorm (1932) in LACMA’s sprawling, cluttered millennial Made in California extravaganza — the modestly scaled but optically riveting oil painting actually caught and held my attention from across the vast museum lobby — I became a little obsessed. Pelton, born in 1881, had quintessentially beat-bohemian credentials. Though born into money, her maternal grandfather — journalist Theodore Tilton — had struck a major blow to American sexual Puritanism by suing his friend Congregationalist minister Henry Ward Beecher, an abolitionist but vocal opponent of the “Free Love” movement, for adultery with his wife. The resultant front-page trial did considerable damage to Beecher’s reputation (and the political credibility of overt sexual repression), and drove Tilton into exile in a Parisian boarding house, where he supported himself by writing poetry. That was the mother’s side. Pelton’s father, a globetrotting bipolar Louisiana sugar heir, OD’d on morphine when Agnes was 9."

Read the rest of Luminous Dames: Georgia, Agnes, Agnes, & Florence at OCMA here


See the show through Sept 6th at the Orange County Museum of Art.

Images all Agnes Pelton; top to bottom: White Fire (c. 1930), The Voice (1930), Light Center (1960-61), Sand Storm (1932)

A Sense of Entitlement

All Hail Sporting Fields' Nigel, NW1! Nigel is the first whippet to have earned the Nosework 1 title, though doubtless many will follow his lead. Always a trailblazer, Nigel was among the first group of pet dogs to pursue this new field of competitive canine sport, which evolved from drug and bomb sniffing training and involves locating arbitrarily scented cotton swabs hidden variously on a vehicle, in a room, in an exterior space, and in one of a series of boxes.You can learn more about Nosework classes and competitions at www.funnosework.com

Above: Nigel nails the exterior search. It was in the watering can.
Below: Nigel with his ribbon.

Precious Ruins

"Those familiar with Steve Canaday’s work from back around the turn of the millennium will recognize this move as a periodic return to the abstract roots from which his lurid imagery blossomed — a consolidation of the lessons gleaned from immersion in skanky figuration. And a rich, black volcanic compost it yields indeed. Consisting of a half-dozen medium-size shaped canvases embossed with coarse monochromatic black-on-black grids of rectangles in high relief, like buttons on a metastasizing cell phone, the tread of a shredded monster truck tire, or an aerial map of a charred cityscape — Canaday’s Black, Blacker, Blackest suite possesses a physicality and gravitas only hinted at in his earlier work.

Highlighted with satellite night vision–green patches and halos, constructed in vague resemblance to automotive fragments, and occasionally sprouting an antenna from a top stretcher bar, these cartoonishly postindustrial geometric abstractions flirt with figuration just enough to spoil their reading as doctrinaire Minimalism, while retaining their prerogative as remarkably decorative objects. Call it Late American Imperial — sumptuous and unique material commodities that seem to embody a stripped-down symbolic divination of their host culture’s impending demise — the last feeble flickering of the fluorescent-green ghost before it becomes all machine, the last sputtering transmission from VALIS to penetrate the Black Iron Prison.

But maybe I’m projecting. There’s a strong temptation to look for signs and portents of impending collapse in the artifacts of a doomed culture, even in the midst of seemingly perpetual supremacy. Of course, this works even better in hindsight, which accounts to some extent for the ongoing public fascination with the excavated detritus of the city of Pompeii. While undeniably constituting one of the most remarkable archeological treasure troves ever dug up, the flash-fried ruins of this first-century Neapolitan resort town have elicited a perverse and subjective fascination from the modern Western imagination since their rediscovery in the mid-18th century.

As a story, it’s pretty much got everything — sex, death, explosions, pathos and a surprising amount of humor. I get a sense that the city’s excavation created a McCluhanesque media shift in our perception and processing of (at least) antiquities — after all, Pompeii and its neighboring cities constitute a sort of holographic virtual-reality snapshot of a 2000-year-old culture — a century before photography began to condition our perceptual models to accommodate such frozen sensory data. This sudden holistic shift had a profound effect on archeology, art history and museology, but also sent shock waves through our species’ common cultural and sensory software."

Read the rest of Apocalypse Now & Then here.

Fuck the Bamboo Ceiling!

Yes! Congratulations to Shirley Tse, 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. Shirley's latest cluster of poly-everything sculptures can be seen at Barnsdall (4800 Hollywood Blvd 90027) in the 2009 COLA Prizes show, through July 12, 2009 -- for which I wrote the attached essay.

“Just one word: Plastics.” This pithy line, the straw that breaks Benjamin Braddock’s antidisestablishmentarian back in the enormously popular 1967 film The Graduate, encapsulates a remarkably pervasive archetypal association between synthetic polymers and a wide range of (mostly negative) social, political, and even spiritual conditions. Dating back at least to the beatnik era - and continuing as a current running through subsequent cultural moments right up to the present – plastic has been a word, an idea, and a material inextricably commingled with notions of inauthenticity, alienation, superficiality, disposability, waste – indeed, virtually all the perceived negative changes wrought upon our species’ 10,000 years of relative agrarian stability by the Industrial Revolution. Polyester doesn’t breathe!

One of the first things that struck me as remarkable about Shirley Tse’s sculptures – after their initial and persistent formal impact - was their function as indicators of a deeper and more complex understanding of this human/plastic relationship – encompassing and acknowledging plastic’s pop-humanist demonization as an important but reductivist aspect of a much larger, finely nuanced, multi-layered and multivalent narrative.

One aspect of this underlying narrative has been an engagement with the history of plastic in art, most conspicuous in Tse’s avoidance of the kinds of plausibly deniable irony that characterize Pop usages of this most modern of materials – as well as the mute fetishism of its Minimalist incarnations. But Tse has cast a much wider net. Before even leaving grad school she had identified the circulating global stream of cheap plastic consumer goods – in which both Los Angeles and the artist’s hometown of Hong Kong act as major hubs – as a central underlying motif in her work’s formal and conceptual gestation.

The geopolitical and systems theory implications arising from this specific template are extensive, yet only hint at the mycelium of interlaced ideational threads underlying the mandala of synthetic ‘shrooms that comprise Tse’s oeuvre. Through intentional research and reference as well as unusually lucid intuitive and associative connections, Tse has imbued work that reads at first glance as playful but enigmatic formalism - brightly colored inflatables, intricately incised slabs of foam, mutated beverage coolers - with the distinctive sense of elaborately interwoven symbolic sets lying just outside our comprehension, elaborately modeled entry points for a vast interdimensional metro system (if only public art looked half as good!)”

Read the catalog version of my essay for Shirley's COLA show here

Or the slightly longer original version in Comments.

Gristle for DeMille

"Throbbing Gristle’s ties to California are deep. The last time they played L.A. was May 1981 — their first-ever gig in the U.S. and their penultimate gig before dissolving the band for more than two decades. But they had, in fact, made quite a “splash” in the L.A. art community several years earlier. In fall 1976 Cosey and P-Orridge appeared as COUM at the experimentally minded artist-run space LAICA, just weeks after having caused a media frenzy in the U.K. tabloids with a state-sponsored gallery exhibit, including used tampons and framed porn-magazine spreads featuring Cosey — a feminist Situationist intervention and welcome source of income

Their L.A. performance of “Cease to Exist No. 4” (named after a Charles Manson composition recorded by roommate Dennis Wilson’s band, the Beach Boys) is local legend. As P-Orridge later recounted, the event was dripping with integrity — as in the sequence where he “takes a hypodermic and stabs it into a testicle, fills it with blood, picks a black egg off thee floor, stabs thee syringe into it ... injecting a total of seven black eggs with his own blood.” P-Orridge later “pisses into a large glass. As he squeezes out the last drop, he farts, and blood mingled with milk shoots out of his arse.”

From this unholy exchange of fluids (and we’re only scratching the surface here, people) were birthed the persona of Marilyn Manson and the cinema of David Lynch, among other important cultural treasures — not to mention electronica, acid house, Survivalist Chic, the Lounge Revival and about three-quarters of the inventory at Hot Topic. Thanks, Throbbing Gristle! Seriously, though, David Lynch rules. I often think of Lynch as an artist who has managed to deal convincingly and creatively with the exigencies of commercial success. Like TG."

Read the rest of Throbbing Gristle's 33rd Annual Report here.

I'm still a little bummed that I didn't get to catch them in the act - no way Coachella, and I was teaching the night they played the live ST to Derek Jarman's Shadow of the Sun at the Ricardo Montalban Theater. But hey, next time, right?

Satan is the Source, of Course of Course

I put this up on Facebook (please explain) for GG2 but it got crunched to unintelligible by some robot. So hopefully if you click on the above image you will be able to read, and learn, and avoid, and live, and move on, my dear friends. Leave comments if you want to learn more from (Doug Harvey's World of) Fascinating People.

On the Road to Westminster

Wow, I've been slackin' with the posts. Teaching, writing, car trouble, plumbing issues, and particularly Portfolio's burgeoning Conformation show career have been eating up the "spare" time. I also started reading novels again. More on that later, but first a couple of shots from the Rio Hondo Kennel Club All Breed Show at Cal Poly Pomona a couple of weekends ago. Above: Portfolio relaxing in the Zone before nailing #2 in a class of 2 (puppies 6 - 9 months). Below: (l-r) Portfolio & Chloe's littermates Phoebe Couture and Diesel, elder siblings Darren and Harmony, who are being handled by the inimitable Valerie Nunes-Atkinson. Throbbing Gristle and more soon!

All well and good, but where's Margaret Keane?

I have a Big-Eye painting in this crazy omnibus show at the Green Gallery in Milwaukee that Kristin Calabrese and Josh Aster put together - all the pieces had to be 11 X 11 or smaller. I realized mine was oversized so I sawed it down and folded it over, securing with monofilament. I forgot to take a picture but here is a surveillance style-rendering enhanced from the official group photo on Facebook. It's part of the Pre-rotted series, and called Processional Mecca. The show's called "Lovable Like Orphaned Kitties and Bastard Children" and opens May 9th.

Video Art Out of Africa

"A couple of weeks ago, the eminent journal Science announced the confirmation of the earliest known human footprints heretofore discovered. Preserved between layers of volcanic ash, the 1.5-million-year-old tracks were shown by laser-scanning analysis to have been made by truly upright citizens (not like those knuckle-dragging Australopitheci).

It should come as no surprise that the footprints were found in East Africa, in the country now known as Kenya; the same neck of the woods where Mitochondrial Eve — the original common female ancestor of every human alive today — is thought to have trod some 150,000 years back.

And it was just a little farther down the coast, in Blombos Cave on the Southern Cape coast of South Africa, that archaeologists in the early 1990s discovered two ochre engraved plaques that had been inscribed with abstract geometric designs approximately 75,000 years ago — predating the cave paintings at Lascaux by a healthy 60 millennia: arguably our species’ oldest objets d’art.

Now let’s look at the headlines ... hmmm ... “Kenyan Police Accused of Widespread Killings” ... “15,000 Flee Southern Darfur” ... “President of Guinea-Bissau Assassinated” ... “Zimbabwe Cholera Epidemic Worsening. ... ”

Seeded with land mines, depleted of natural resources, riddled with plague, political corruption, poverty and starvation; her social structures pulverized to a jittery, explosive subatomic mush, awash in imported toxic waste, homogenized global urban culture and IMF debt, Africa is as much our future as it is our past.



The curators at the Fowler Museum know this — at least it seems so, going by their track record, with shows like 2003’s “A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal,” which traced the proliferation and mutation of a single image of Sufi saint Amadou Bamba across almost every surface of Dakar, and last year’s “Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art” — far and away the most compelling recent L.A. exhibit on the relationship between language and art. Both epitomize the Fowler’s ongoing commitment to representing the artistic practices of the non-Anglo world, Africa in particular, in all their complex vitality: balanced between ancient local traditions, contemporary international Art World strategies, and coping mechanisms for the coming apocalypse.

Of course, in the short term, it is the middle ground that is of greatest interest to the artists, curators and other players engaged in the effort to shift some capital away from Damien Hirst, Richard Prince and (South African–born) Marlene Dumas and into the grass-roots art economies of Dakar, Johannesburg and Lagos — or at least generate some art stars to compete on Charles Saatchi’s playing field."

Images: Muxima Alfredo Jaar 2005

Read the rest of Digital Roots: Continental Rifts at Fowler Museum here

And here's the Fowler's webpage about the shows.

None of the Above

"Toward the end of Membrane Lane, Charles Irvin’s faux conspiracy documentary on the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (an organization that champions people claiming to have been falsely accused of child sexual abuse), there’s a particularly startling non sequitur. In the midst of the relatively straightforward montage of appropriated news footage and sequences in which the camo fatigues–sporting narrator/artist explains his conspiratorial flow charts, there is a jump cut to a strangely familiar image, which takes a second to place — a shot of the “foaming brush” in one of those DIY car washes, leaning upright against the generic tile wall, oozing globs of white soap. Then, just as you realize the footage is reversed, and the brush is sucking the foam up from the gutter back into its infinite milky reservoir, the rebunking of the Satanic abuse debunkers continues, leaving you with that distinctive “Wait! What the fuck was that, and how did it get in here?” sensation.



This sort of conceptual embolism seems to be the curatorial premise of Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A., the current museum omnibus exhibit where Irvin’s DayGlo-primitivist cartoon paintings — and video — can currently be experienced. Nine Lives is something of a curatorial coming-out party for Hammer adjunct curator Ali Subotnick, whose genealogy as co-founder/director of prank Chelsea nonspace Wrong Gallery and occasional high-end journal Charley (both in collaboration with fellow critic/curator Massimiliano Gioni and eminent Vaffanculist Maurizio Cattelan) should have pushed her to the front of the schedule of exhibitions a couple years ago.



Tellingly, Nine Lives is more reminiscent of one of these prior joint efforts than it is of the Hammer’s string of previous regional survey shows (Snapshot, Thing, East of Eden) with which it is publicly equated. The most recent Charley (No. 5) is a treasure chest of idiosyncratic visual genius (if not the corresponding data — none of the artworks is dated or identified, and most of the essays are cribbed from Wikipedia), compiling the work of diverse outsiders like Jess, Noah Purifoy, Ree Morton, Forrest Bess, Christopher Knowles and more than 100 other remarkable figures from the margins of the contemporary art-historical canon.



Nine Lives shifts the focus to living artists working in Los Angeles but keeps the quirk factor — and its attendant awkwardness in terms of art-world acceptability — cranked to 11. Foremost among these are two of L.A.’s elder statesmen of quirk: Llyn Foulkes and Jeffrey Vallance. Foulkes is a remarkable painter, whose half-century of work seamlessly integrates Abstract Expressionism, West Coast Assemblage and Pop alongside his darkly personal political ruminations and signature obsession with exaggerated pictorial relief effects, with his carved-out Disney figures and post-Apocalyptic landscapes verging on the dimensionality of dioramas. Great as it is to see such a stellar selection of his work in one place (particularly his epic The Last Frontier, last seen briefly in the back of Patty Faure’s gallery), one hopes it doesn’t function in lieu of the overdue full retrospective Foulkes and the L.A. art community deserve."



Read the rest of Peripheral Visions: Nine of L.A.’S Square Pegs Get Hammered here.

Images:
Lisa Anne Auerbach Never Forget (front) 2007
Victoria Reynolds Flight of the Reindeer 2003
Charles Irvin Untitled 2008
Llyn Foulkes Deliverance 2007 (This piece was supposed to be in Some Paintings, BTW)
Lisa Anne Auerbach Never Forget (back) 2007

It's Like a Bathtub in Here

I seem to remember taking some photos at Lee's screening, but I'm pretty sure this wasn't one of them. I'll get around to that later - I just wanted to direct your attention to this outstanding recent experimental graphic narrative on John Higham's blog. Not Obscure is always worth checking out for John's richly rewarding take on life on earth (particularly in a tiny Inuit village in Nunavut), but once in a while he drops one of his mind-bending art or literary gems in the mix, adding a whole other dimension. Case in point being The Adventures of Jack in Dreamland. "Enjoy"

Towards a Hier Good

"Click image to enlarge"

Thursday, March 26, 2009
6:00pm - 11:00pm
Screenings at 6, 7:30, & 9
Gayle & Ed Roski MFA Gallery
Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT)
3001 S. Flower St.
Los Angeles, CA 90007
(Entrance on 30th St. between Flower St. and Figueroa St.)

Hi Good is Coming Down Fast

Thursday night marks the debut screenings of Lee Lynch's new film project (and one night only thesis exhibit for his MFA candidacy at USC) "Ned's Draw or the Murder of Hi Good" screening at 6, 7:30, and 9 PM at the USC Roski Graduate Fine Arts Gallery, 3001 South Flower (just east of Figueroa) LA 9007. Followers of this blog will be aware of my lengthy involvement with this project - in fact my very first posting relates to it. I was on the shoot in January, up near Chico, and got hundreds of documentary photos plus 12 hours of 'making of' video footage. Here's a handful. I'll try and post another selection over the next day or two.

I Was a Twentysomething Painting Pachyderm

Here's something from 1987 or so that I thought was lost in the mists of time (AKA the molds of the garden shed) but turned up during research for my forthcoming website www.dougharvey.la

I've always been fond of elephants, but I forgot how far back my interest in them as visual artists went. For the LA Weekly's 2003 List Issue I wrote:

"Sometime in the early '80s, a Syracuse zookeeper named David Gucwa gave a paintbrush to the African elephant Siri and a new branch of non-human art history was born. A few years later, Ruby, an elephant at the Phoenix zoo, became a media sensation with her prodigious output of vibrant works. Realizing the fund-raising potential, zoos across America began shelling out for art supplies. Russian artists Komar and Melamid were inspired to open a school for unemployed Thai elephants to learn painting — a story outlined in their 2000 book When Elephants Paint. These sarcastic foreigners have more than a little invested in ridiculing Modernism, but the good their patronage has done is undeniable — sanctuaries in Thailand, India and Bali now support themselves with work by dozens of elephant artists sold through online galleries at www.soarts.com and www.novica.com. The Balinese sanctuary has been suffering the tourist gap since those discos blew up, and may be assisted directly at baliadventuretours.com. Look for the link to the Have-a-Art Appeal."

Read the rest of Doug Harvey's Favorite Non-Human Artwork here. Those links may be obsolete, but a good place to start looking is www.elephantart.com

The Things in the Kitchen

Things have been pretty hectic what with the puppies and teaching a painting class and disposing of all my old art but I should plug this since I'm in it: L.A. collectors Sirje and Michael Gold have curated the art auction segment of the annual fundraising event WIDE ANGLE for the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach, pairing "thirty established artists with thirty artists whose works have been less accessible for Southern California audiences". I'm the latter, paired with Roger Herman. For my piece, I actually took Roger's woodcut kitchen image, flipped it horizontal, and then found all the entities hiding in his composition. There was a preview (and the silent auction of some paired works began) on March 12th at the SmogShoppe in Culver City, but the live auction itself is at the UAM (CSULB, 1250 Bellflower Boulevard, Long Beach, CA 90840-8401) on the 21st in conjunction with a Salle/Armitage shindig. The art will be viewable at the UAM from March 18th through the 20th from 12 to 5 PM. More info here. Above: Kitchen Below: Chien TK (Dog is Coming)

Bonus Art Tip: Chloe actually ate the buff titanium oilstick I used on my painting, and I called the ASPCA poison hotline, and they said that it was OK, and it was.

S'more Paintings

There's been a recent surge of shows by painters who were included in last January's Third Annual LA Weekly Biennial: Some Paintings, and I was hoping to write a roundup piece for the Weekly. Unfortunately, scheduling it was too much of a nightmare, so I'll just use this forum to alert the world to the following current, upcoming, and missed opportunities to catch up on the LA painting scene. Above, Chloe experiences a Dutcherific thought bubble embolism at LAVC's Intuitive Eye: The Diana Zlotnick Collection, which also includes this c. 1960 work by mysterious SP participant Michael Oledart, as well as pieces by Adrian de la Pena, Llyn Foulkes, and Michael Arata.

Mark Dutcher's work is also the subject of a typically spectacular solo show called Havilah at Steve Turner Gallery through March 21. Below: Total Eclipse, 2009


Brad Eberhard's solo debut As Different as Twins is up under the auspices of Thomas Solomon Gallery at Cottage Home through March 14th. Below: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2009

Tomory Dodge's latest ACME show After Forever is also up through the 14th. Below: Stars, 2009 

Llyn Foulkes, Charles Irvin, and Victoria Reynolds are all featured in Ali Subotnick's Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from LA exhibit at the Hammer Museum, up through May 31. Foulkes: The Lost Frontier, 1997-2005; Irvin: Untitled, 2008; Reynolds: Flight of the Reindeer, 2003







There's also a bunch of shows that have come down, but can still be digi-seen online, including Esther Pearl Watson at Billy Shire, John Kilduff at Jancar, Lisa Adams at Lawrence Asher, Monique Prieto at ACME, Michael Arata at Woodbury University, Constance Mallinson at Angles, David Korty at Michael Kohn, and Kaz Oshiro at Rosamund Felsen. You can understand how I had a little trouble getting organazized! And I'm sure there's a couple I've forgotten - I thought I saw something about an Annie Lapin installation in Pasadena, but it ain't googlin'.

Oh well. Watson: Washing My Hair in the Tub, 2008; Kilduff, Internet TV Collaboration #5, 2008; Adams: After the Deluge, 2008; Prieto: Tomorrow Morning, 2008; Arata: Nigel negotiating Obstacle Course, 2008; Mallinson: Decaying Olympia, 2008; Korty: Untitled (Magazine Stand), 2008; Oshiro: Untitled corner Piece (Turquoise), 2008.

Deutschland Deutschland

"I wonder what Syd Barrett was doing on July 21, 1990, whilst his former Pink Floyd bandmate Roger Waters was cranking the bombast to 11 in Berlin by supersizing that already bloated paean to bilious self-pity known as The Wall and conflating it with the decommissioning — six months prior — of the “anti-Fascist protective rampart” that had divided the German capital and stood as a symbol of Yankee/Soviet stalemate for the previous quarter century. Probably painting.

After his death in 2006, it was revealed that Syd had spent much of his three-decade withdrawal from show business making art, which he sometimes photographed before painting over or destroying. The question that nags me is this: Which is the greater creative act, micromanaging a spectacular but rehashed postmodern Gesamtkunstwerk for half a million people (and millions more via live satellite TV — and all ostensibly for charity!), or daubing away in a Cambridge cellar on a canvas that will probably never see the light of day?

What brings this to mind is Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures, an ambitious and treasure-laden exhibit now happily displacing Damien Hirst (among others) from the second floor of LACMA’s BCAM building. It isn’t just the superficial Berlin Wall reference that summons the mighty Floyd, but the jostling polarities at play, that between hubristic historical importance and unrecorded humility as artistic motivators, and of the almost cosmic narrative of good and evil that drove Cold War politics — and tried to oblige Art into choosing a side.

Completing curator Stephanie Barron’s exceptional historical trilogy that began with 1991’s Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany and continued with ’97’s Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, Two Germanys adheres to this übernarrative closely, albeit in a subtly nuanced and richly detailed way. Beginning with Richard Peter Sr.’s claustrophobic, horizonless documentary photographs of the charred rubble (and citizens) of Dresden, the exhibit winds in a chronological circuit through the schizophrenic era of reconstruction toward the conceptual terminus of reunification. Shell-shocked attempts to assimilate the recent carnage with the tools of Modernism provide the first of many painterly gems, with the luminous biomorphic abstractions of Willi Baumeister, who chose to remain in Third Reich Germany, working in secret after being classified as degenerate.

The bifurcating streams of Communist Party–sanctioned Socialist Realism and laissez faire expressions of the Westside “economic miracle” afford glimpses into summarily disparaged modes of narrative figuration and prescient op/kinetic gizmoism respectively, while the first stirrings of anticonsumerist skepticism that blossomed in the “Capitalist Realism” of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke are traced to the 1950s typewriter and sewing-machine portraits of Konrad Klapheck. A tableful of Dresdenite Herman Glöckner’s constructivist models — assembled in secret from tiny bits of trash to evade the disapproving eye of the East German Socialist Unity Party — provides a hauntingly poetic riposte to both official programs of aesthetic progress, while looking eerily contemporary — like something from last month’s grad-school open studios."

Read the rest of Divided We Stand: Art of Two Germanys here

Images:
Roger (Syd) Barrett Untitled, 1963, Pencil and oil on board (not in the show, Dummkopf!)
Willi Baumeister Gravour Faust – Scherzo, 1952, Oil and pencil on cardboard (also not in the show, but one I particularly like)
Various models by Herman Glöckner, c. 1960
Sigmar Polke, Object Kartoffelhaus (Potato House Object), 1967