Sunset Stripped: The Mistaken Identity of the Los Angeles Art Center

     Los Angeles is trying. As per our Twitter feed, actors and hip hop stars are visiting Jeffrey Deitch’s pet project Art in the Streets—a problematic street art retrospective at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art—which should pump steroidal numbers into the museums 236,104 visitors from 2010. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art must have seen a challenge by Deitch through this and last year’s posthumous Dennis Hopper photo exhibit. The ostensibly more prestigious of the two (and far higher attended, with a turnstile count expected at over a million for 2011) countered with a Tim Burton exhibit and a show of celebrity photographer Firooz Zahedi photographs of Elizabeth Taylor in Iran. It’s a race to see who can deem Warholian celebrity art a Los Angeles forte first. Cynical, yes, but L.A., and its vast foreign import market, has always been obsessed with pop; why doesn’t the art world just give in and give the people what they want?
     Of course, this is all bringing attention to the big four museums of Los Angeles—MOCA, LACMA, The Getty, and The Hammer—beefing up their attendance, and drawing eyes to Pacific Standard Time, a citywide arts initiative implemented by The Getty, which investigates how important Los Angeles art was from 1945 through 1980. Which is to say, what happened? Why are we looking back at a time in Los Angeles when L.A. wasn’t considered such an arts center? When the city’s artists and galleries flew under the international radar? When there wasn’t a need for an art fair? When the major contribution of Los Angeles to the art world was the schools? When Robert Irwin, Mike Kelley, John Baldessari, and Ed Ruscha made this place home? What does this say about the cultural landscape of L.A.? And how do the decisions these institutions make effect change in Los Angeles’ problematically celebrity-obsessed society?
See, Los Angeles never really was an arts town. It wasn’t until 1961 that LACMA opened. By comparison, The Met in New York opened in 1870. People choose air-conditioned movie theaters showing 3D pirates and such over galleries showing 3D sculptures. Angelenos live in castles on hills and go to parties to party (i.e. not look at art). One film world friend put it to me succinctly: “I hate art.” I took it to mean, “Angelenos hate the art world, the inward-looking, self-congratulating, snooty, high-falutin’ art world.” Art is something of a difficult nut to crack for Angelenos in much the same way the film industry seems vapid to New Yorkers. The great fallacy of Los Angeles is that it is an arts center already. Last year’s ARCO Madrid and Portugal Arte 10 in Lisbon both featured stout L.A. art alcoves, and the recently opened Greater L.A. is an exhibition of Los Angeles artists organized by three New Yorkers and positioned in a SoHo loft space in New York. Los Angeles says, “Business is booming,” over and over again. “New Yorkers keep moving out here.” Influx is the mantra. Deitch, L&M Arts, OHWOW, LAND. The tides are turning, the wind is shifting, Los Angeles has the upper hand.
     Alas, L.A. Times’ Christopher Knight is no Jerry Saltz. They both recently wrote obituaries to the great L.A. sculptor John McCracken, who died in New York in April.  Saltz, ever the populist, ended his obit with, “He was a great space cowboy.” Knight, as a Californian, should be talking like that. Instead, he’s so self-serious, I just want to shake him out of his pomposity. His final take on McCracken’s art? “Their shape is resolutely linear, but the point at which the line assumes the dimensional properties of a shape is indefinable.” Attending a recent Ace Gallery opening of a Robert Irwin spire made me actually feel bad for Irwin. I can’t imagine that same nattering crowd at The Pace Gallery. And if I were to be given a choice of out-of-the-way, youth-oriented museums, I’m sorry, but attending a PS1: Warm Up jam DJ’d by Sal Principato from Liquid Liquid is just so much more appealing than The Hammer’s Vauxhall Broadcast concert. In New York, you go “gallery hopping”; in L.A. it’s called an “art walk” (which sounds like something that happens with pottery artists in Missoula, Montana). And so on and so forth.
Los Angeles is trying.
     Perhaps I’m being a bit unjust. Maybe there’s good art in the nooks and crannies, which because of its relative remoteness, almost seems a little more special. Culver City and Chinatown, where much of the gallery action happens, might as well be in different cities as far as the general Angeleno is concerned—L.A. is a city where you could go a whole day in your car and not see a single person. Maybe it’s too hard to navigate for the nascent art lover. You can’t just stumble into a gallery, and you can’t just stumble into art here. This leaves the art to the art lovers. I know this isn’t the point, by any means, but isn’t there a higher probability of your work succeeding (whatever that means) in having a captive audience? Yes, the artists here will forever be top-notch. The space and the light and the history are second to none. But the galleries and the necessary support systems leave something to be desired.
     I took a recent stroll along La Cienega Avenue, where most of L.A.’s top galleries have exiled themselves. Taylor De Cordoba is a gallery that is tiny for Los Angeles’ expanse-obsessed art community, and yet it reminds me most of one of those quaint, cool little galleries you might find in the Lower East Side of New York. They were showing the artist Timothy Hull. “I’m only in town for tonight,” he confessed. He had been working on much larger paintings and drawings that featured much of the same content and imagery as the show here, but shipping costs confined those pieces back in his studio in New York. His show featured imagery and ephemera of the ‘80s—Boy George, Swatch watches, one of those yellow waterproof Walkmans, African cause célèbres. There were 15 or so people in or around Taylor De Cordoba at that time, which was squarely in the middle of the art walk, both in time and location.
     A few more people were inside Honor Fraser, a space run by a Scottish model-cum-gallerina with a penchant for pop artists like Kenny Scharf, KAWS, and Tomoo Gokita. Hers is the biggest space in Culver City and she shows three things at a time. Most interestingly, she’d tapped Mexican artist Yoshua Okón and dealer Esthella Provas to curate a group show of Mexican artists. Particularly striking was MORIS’ “El fuego nos quemará a todos, ja ja ja ja” (2011), a white linen mat painted with a special acrylic treated with dirt repellant. At the start, the mat looked unassuming, but as people walked on it, the titular words were revealed—graffiti that was found next to a gang slaying which translates to, “The fire will burn us all, ha ha ha ha.”
     Down in Culver, LA><ART; and Cherry and Martin; and China Art Objects; and Blum and Poe; and David Kordansky; and Roberts & Tilton; and François Ghebaly; and Michael Benevento; and Margo Leavin; and Susanne Vielmetter stand tall. Head over to Beverly Hills and you’ll find Gagosian and Regen Projects. Chinatown has Pepin Moore and Jancar and other emerging artist galleries. L&M Arts is in Venice, ltd los angeles is up on Sunset in the old English Disco, Machine Project is in Echo Park, Patrick Painter’s in Santa Monica, OHWOW just moved into upper La Cienega. There are galleries in the Pacific Design Center and on Wilshire. The art fairs are out in Santa Monica, where there are airplane hangars to hang art as far as the eye can see. Essentially, there’s heaps on offer.
And yet, I say this sincerely, as someone who loves art more than anything and loves to be involved and puts his soul into this damned, evil, backstabbing industry, “Keep trying, L.A.”