Recent
Pasts: Art in Southern California
from the 90s to Now
Introduction
John C Welchman
The founding member schools of the consortium were Art Center College of Art and Design, Pasadena; California Institute of the Arts, Valenicia; Claremont Graduate School; Otis College of Art and Design; University of California, Irvine; UCLA; University of California, San Diego; and the University of Southern California. In Fall 2004 the University of California, Santa Barbara joined SoCCAS (with Renée Green as its faculty representative).
A faculty committee comprised of representatives from each school developed SoCCAS’s inaugural symposium with a view to providing an informal map of key developments in the art scene of Southern California over the last decade and half. We wanted to hear a range of voices from across different artistic communities, including not only practicing artists, but curators, city cultural officials, critics and a recently graduated young artist from a member school. We also wanted discussion of art contexts outside of metropolitan Los Angeles, where more than half of the consortium schools are located.
Beyond these loose parameters, and a sense of commitment to artists in their early or mid careers, we didn’t impose any further conditions on our participants. It soon became apparent, however, that our project had three zones of focus: on new initiatives from within the institutional or commercial sectors of the art world, which we called “Inside”; on developments mostly situated outside of this more sanctioned sphere, whether in alternative spaces or the public domain, which we termed “Outside”; and finally, on innovative art and art-related activities that were taking place in sites, such as the southern California deserts and San Diego-Tijuana border, that are relatively remote from the culturally dominant LA basin, which we labeled “New Locations.” Of course, these sectors were neither discrete nor in any sense definitive. So we decided to program a final panel (“Endpapers”) with short presentations by three artists and a critic whose independent thinking and constructively targeted polemic has helped shape art world discourse in Southern California in recent years. Included here was a recently graduated MFA student, Yanira Cartagena who chaired the organizing committee for a parallel initiative among the SoCCAS art programs, the group exhibition Supersonic, which exhibited work by graduating MFAs from the then eight member schools and opened with great fanfare the night before the symposium.
Cultural historian and regional California aficionado, Norman Klein, plays weatherman for the introduction to the volume. In “The Boost: Cultural Meteorology in Southern California” he meditates on the changing images and self-representations of Los Angeles and vicinity, coupling this with a deeper and more ironic account of how the area’s control of many aspects of visual media is interleaved with the enduring cliché’s of its own identity: sun and surf, palm trees and freeways.
The essayists addressing developments from “Inside” the institutional and commercial art world of Southern California were chosen because they have both spent significant parts of their careers as writers, curators and artists exploring the hinterland between the official or market-oriented sectors and more alternative forms of art practice and criticism. MOCA curator Cornelia Butler offers a reflection on the changing nature of curatorial practice, mapping the shifts she describes in relation to the ambitious and much-anticipated exhibition of feminist art on which she is currently working, “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (due at MOCA December 10 2006 to April 17, 2007). For her contribution, artist and writer Frances Stark offers a personal history of the rapid development of the art scene in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, where she has maintained a studio since 1998. Shortly thereafter, Chinatown emerged on the art world radar with the opening of China Art Objects, and in the past seven years as many as forty galleries and alternative spaces have opened along Chung King Road and nearby streets and alleys. Stark addresses the layered issues and nagging questions that have informed her Chinatown years: the role of artists in an ethnic neighborhood; the grails of success and legitimization; gentrification; crossovers between art and music; criticism and reportage; and the speculator mindset of many collectors. Stark suggests that the popularity of Chinatown is founded less in a declarative shift in artistic style or exhibition practice, and more in its image potential—whether played out in terms of real estate, utopia, bohemia, art history … or all of the above.
The second section of the book, “Outside,” addressed to art practices located beyond the confines of the gallery, museum or art institution, is modified slightly from the symposium. For the live event, Julie Silliman, Cultural Arts Planner at the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles, who is responsible for guiding art projects in public and private developments within 34 redevelopment neighborhoods including Downtown, Hollywood, Crenshaw, San Pedro, Watts, and North Hollywood, described a wide range of public art projects commissioned by her agency (and others) over the last decade. While artists have created public art in Los Angeles for more than a century, it is only in the last twenty-five years or so that such work has evolved in coordinated relation to government mandate. As more and more branches of government and individual municipalities embrace public art and it can now be found with increasing frequency throughout the public domain, the art programs which fueled this explosion, she argued, are largely reactive entities—following changes in theory and practice developed within the disciplines that shape the built environment. Silliman used these determining considerations as the bases on which she grouped and filtered the development of the public art projects she presented—whether temporary installations (such as that by Cindy Bernard and Joseph Hammer inside MTA Metro Blue Line trains; and the humorous fake signs at a park in Santa Monica by the Happy Puddle Collective), or a major, permanent work, such as the interactive electronic project for a new housing complex across from the Staples Center by Cameron McNall .
Paradoxically, the availability of public art to a diverse audience, outside of the institutional context of art viewing, often renders the work invisible to the so-called art world. Silliman examined a range of related issues including how changes in art practice impact what artists create for the public; the relation of sculpture to architectural structure (as in Liz Larner’s Bridge at Walt Disney Studio, a 321 ft. long undulating blue pedestrian bridge in Burbank, or Richard Turner’s design of the MTA’s Metro Green Line Aviation Station which mimics the neighborhood’s aerospace buildings from the 1950s); or how artists are introducing alternative narratives into spaces typically dominated by commercial messages (Erica Rothenberg’s The Road to Hollywood—How some of us got there infuses quirky tales of personal successes by film industry insiders into the infrastructure of the mega Hollywood & Highland shopping center; while Beep,Inc’s [Pae White and Tom Marble] Rapid Bus bus card decals, bus seat fabric designs, bus stop seating and symbols tell multiple stories of romance set amongst the Boulevards and destinations along the bus route); and, finally, how artists including Robert Irwin, Barbara McCarren, Jacci Den Hartog and Elizabeth Bryant have used their interest in plants to influence landscape and garden designs.
Unfortunately, Silliman was unable to convert her talk on new practices of public art into written form (she was, understandably, busy becoming the mother of twins!). We therefore invited curator and art and media historian Rita Gonzalez to contribute an essay on recent developments in the Southland’s Latino/a and Chicano/a art worlds, one of several key topics that we had originally intended to program but were unable to because of time limitations in the auditorium. Gonzalez’s text, “Strangeways Here We Come,” thinks-through the shape of new work in her community in relation to a series of encounters and discussions between different protagonists and generations, emphasizing that the emergence of new forms and ideas has been a function of intense self-reflection and animated exchange in which many of the stereotypes of Latino/a practice have been simultaneously rejuvenated, recast and rejected.
For the symposium, artist and DJ Dave Muller gave a spirited illustrated introduction to his work concentrating on the development after 1994 of his signature Three Day Weekends, a series of evolving, nomadic collaborative project spaces conceived and operated by Muller for provisional locations that range from galleries to freight elevators, and generally run for three days on holidays and adjoining weekends. To give a sense of the geographies (London, Tokyo, Athens, San Francisco, New York, among other cites), issues and textures of the TDW phenomenon—which include Muller’s notion of “amorphous authorship,” and what critic Ralph Rugoff referred to as “territorial trespassing”—we decided to reprint a key interview between Muller and the curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, conducted in 1998; to which I added a few questions on more recent developments.
In their essay, “The Big Squeeze: Micromedia in the Age of Megalomedia,” media critic Holly Willis and Anne Bray, the founder and director of the biennial video festival LA Freewaves, trace a history of video art and media production, distribution and exhibition in Los Angeles within a multi-layered context that includes funding shifts, changes in the city’s geography, and the evolution of digital technology. LA Freewaves and other notable projects in media and new media programming in and around Los Angeles in the 20 years,including c-level (in Chinatown), Art in Motion (AIM) and key new media programs at several schools and campuses, form a cluster of innovations that underline the powerful contribution made by Southern California artists, critics and curators in these areas of practice. c-level, recently reformulated as Betalevel, is a cooperative public and private lab formed in 2001 to share physical, social, and technological resources, with a membership of artists, programmers, writers, designers, agit-propers, filmmakers and reverse-engineers. Part studio, part club, part stage and part screen, c-level plays host to media events such as screenings, performances, classes, lectures, debates, dances, readings and tournaments. AIM was founded in 1999 by Janet Owen and Jim Keller, and originated as a response to globalization of communications protocols, including the Internet, over the last decade or so. Until 2004, it supported digital media artists with an infrastructure—including physical spaces for production and theme-based exhibitions, public education programs, and fora for theoretical discourse within the time-based media community.
Bray and Willis examine these developments in relation to signal changes and realignments over the last two decades: in public and private funding and sponsorship; in technological development; in the art world’s shifting relationship to time-based media; and in the second of the “big squeezes” that title their essay, the global compression of time and space.
The third section of the book addresses three “New Locations” for art practice beginning and at the southern and eastern edges of California. Curator and critic, Osvaldo Sánchez discusses the evolution of inSite over the past dozen years or so and introduces the curatorial concept for inSite_05. Since its inception in 1992, inSite has mapped the intricate networks of permeability and blockage that characterize the border zone of San Diego-Tijuana. Recognized for its importance both as a strategic node of globalization and as a locus for reimagining contemporary identities, the San Diego-Tijuana region has increasingly become a site of extensive critical analysis. Focused on the specificity of the San Diego-Tijuana corridor as a mutant context of unexpected political and cultural rearticulations, inSite’s activities revolve around periods of artists’ residencies and intricate processes of collaboration and coauthorship. Throughout successive versions of the project, groups of curators and artists have contributed diverse models of practice through which inSite has proposed new readings and added further layers to the region’s socio-cultural weave: from inSITE92’s emphasis on installation art; to an interest in spatial and symbolic context demonstrated by the in situ works of inSITE94; to subtle intrusions in urban space and its public representations in inSITE97; to diverse processes of cultural practice evident in inSITE2000, when works were based as much on events and experiences as on aesthetic products of controlled visibility. Sánchez argues that “Bypass,” the theoretical axis of inSite_05, seeks to interlace situations of flux, mobility, and experiences of interconnectedness by bringing together a group of artists and curators interested in “stimulating the gestation of new utopias of belonging and dynamics of association within the public domain.” inSite_05 presents a “connective topology that links the mobility of urban networks with the cultural displacements and symbolic transformations of urban identities in flux.”
In “A Guided Tour of the Center for Land Use Interpretation [CLUI],” the experienced expeditionaries, Matthew Coolidge and Erik Knutson present a history of the CLUI, founded in 1994, by unfolding an annotated map of the complex territories of the Center’s activities—public tours, exhibitions, publications, archives, databases, and site-specific extrapolative work in the field. Since its inception, CLUI has set its sights on marginal or overlooked landscapes and outposts, operating at the borders of science and at the edges of the art world. Crossing the liminal and the well-trodden, remote locations and urban centers, working “under the radar” from a nondescript storefront in Culver City, yet operating on multiple fronts or sites, and garnering national attention, CLUI epitomizes the subtle renegotiation that characterizes one strand of recent art in Southern California between new social and geographic terrains.
The contribution of artist Marcos Ramirez (ERRE) and architect and theorist Teddy Cruz, “Zero Art in TJ” contextualizes recent cultural, urbanistic and social developments at the geographic, political, and artistic boundary between Tijuana and San Diego. As San Diego Union critic, Robert Pincus, notes Ramirez "has been one of the most trenchant observers of border culture for several years." His public art frequently challenges boundaries assumed by social relations and charges them with historically-conscious irony. ERRE’s project for inSite 97–a 30-foot Trojan Horse brought to the San Ysidro border——was the work of what Mike Davis called “a consummate magical realist.” For his part, ERRE suggests that geographical and political boundaries are ultimately about the private individual at the border of the public: “Chicano artists often have a problem of feeling they have left their culture behind. They learn a new language but forget the old one –-and that’s sad. It’s good not to forget anything. Instead of feeling half Mexican and half American, I feel double.”
Cruz and ERRE also take us on a tour, but this time through the improvisational vitality of Tijuana’s hydrid socio-architectural space. They introduce us to a spectrum of householder-designers from the barrios to the new middle-class, who deploy such a bewildering array of found and recombined materials, appropriational tactics, and belligerent ingenuity that the metropolitan art world’s more mannered versions of similar gestures begin to look a little staid.
The symposium concluded with short presentations and a panel discussion between three Southern California artists, Meg Cranston, Daniel J. Martinez and Yanira Cartagena who were joined by critic and curator, Malik Gaines (“End Papers”). We have preserved the spirit of this round-table by asking the panelists to present a brief position paper based on their remarks in the Silver Screen Theater. Cranston’s “Building a Better School: A Corrective Rethinking of the Concepts” is a modestly iconoclastic proposal for rethinking the whole idea and purpose of the art school. Bursting the bubble of the vaunted reputations garnered in the press by various SoCal schools over the last decade or so, her tongue-in-cheek manifesto dismantles the magna dicta of the growth-oriented art academy arguing against fundraising, bigger buildings, ever more equipment and cornucopic student subsidy.
In “We Are All Conservatives … or … We Are Dogs in Love With Our Own Vomit,” Daniel J. Martinez raises the stakes of Cranston’s irony with a zestful polemic launched against the complacent branding of what he terms “global corporate conceptualism.” For Martinez 21st century artists have an obligation to confront their social confusion and make work in the space between “art, radical politics, and radical theory.” Chair of the steering committee of MFA students drawn from the eight member schools, Cartagena’s “1 wind tunnel, 8 schools, 120 artists” is a candid view of the process and effects of the Supersonic exhibition hosted by Art Center, Pasadena in the giant Wind Tunnel space at their new south campus. Organized and installed by the MFAs themselves, this initiative resulted in what is probably the largest and most ambitious group exhibition of graduating art school artists ever attempted, and drew commentary from the regional and national press. Offering a participant point of view, Cartagena examines the process, successes and limitations of the show, noting that it did much to promote exchange between the schools, managed to avoid stamping students with campus-specific IDs, and, most importantly perhaps, that by virtue of both its democratic lay-out and design and the critical orientation of particular contributions, Supersonic was more of a showcase for the creative diversity of genres, styles and approaches to art-making in the 8 schools than a kind of ‘emerging art fair’—as predicated by some observers.
Gaines’ “Theater of the Repressed … or … All I Got Was This Lousy MFA” discusses a number of Southern Californian art practices, including Beat of the Traps (1992) a collaboration between Mike Kelley, Anita Pace and Steven Prina, and work by Catherine Sullivan that range across the intersection between performance, theater, dance and music—“working in the inderdiscipline,” as he puts it. Gaines (who participates in the collaborative band/performance group, My Barbarian, as well as writing criticism, performance scripts and in other textual forms), argues that an “expanded pedagogy” is needed on the part of the art schools to keep in check the centrifugal pressures of calibrating success according to market validation or generic delimitation.
Allan Sekula was unable to participate in the symposium, so we have added to End Papers a brief essay by him, “Facing the Music.” It was published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same title, curated by Sekula for Gallery at REDCAT, Los Angeles, April 14–May 29, 2005. The exhibition included photographs by Anthony Hernandez and Karin Apollonia Müller; a digital installation by James Baker; and Billy Woodberry’s DVD, The architect, the ants and the bees (2005); as well as Sekula’s 18-minute DVD Gala (2005), and slide projection piece, Prayer for the Americans 3 (Disney Stockholders) (1997/2005). Using Frank Gehry’s new Disney Concert Hall on Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles as a focus, Sekula returns to the issue of civic boosterism discussed by Klein, reminding us of all that is marginalized or occluded by the master-narratives of high-brow cultural achievement—whether measured in human, infrastructural or environmental terms.
Dave Muller, Free Boat Ride, 2004,
acrylic on paper, 107 1/2 x 51 inches. Photo: Joshua White
Courtesy of Blum & Poe
John C. Welchman
Norman Klein
Connie Butler
Dave Muller
Osvaldo
Sánchez
Erik Knutzen
Marcos Ramirez ERRE
Julie Silliman
Yanira Cartegena, Malik Gaines, Meg Cranston
Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object,
1949 - 1979
Installation View, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo:
Brian Forrest. Courtesy The Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles
Pocho Research Society of Erased and Invisible History
Operation Invisible Monument, 2002
Documentation
Courtesy of the artist
Ted Fisher and Douglas McCulloh
20,000 Portraits, 2001-2003
LA Freewaves Video Billboard, Sunset Blvd.
Photo: Fisher | McCulloh
Courtesy of the artists
Gustavo Artigas
The Rules of the Game, 2000-2001
Still from the Video-document of the performance
inSite2000-2001
Courtesy of inSite
Center For Land Use Interpretation (CLUI)
Tour bus in a gravel pit in Irwindale, California during the 'Margins
in Our Midst' tour, 2003
Copyright CLUI
Courtesy of Steve Rowell / CLUI
Marcos Ramírez ERRE
Toy an Horse, 1997
12' x 33' x 29', wood and metal hardware
Installation View
Courtesy inSite97
Daniel Joseph Martinez
In front of Slanguage Gallery in Wilmington California, Aaron
Sandnes, Kara Tanaka, Saul Alvarez and
Daniel Joseph Martinez. June 5th, 2005. Courtesy Daniel Joseph
Martinez
Supersonic (1 Wind Tunnel, 8 Schools, 120 Artists),
2004
Installation View
Art Center College of Design, Pasadena
Photo: Pete Galinda
My Barbarian, MB: The Mary Blair Story, 2004
Redcat, Los Angeles, Photo: Amy Bessone.
James Baker, Untitled, 2005, digital installation.
Courtesy the artist.