Your Social Life This Weekend

Hello dear beloved readers,

Our regular feature "Your Social Life" is returning on FBC!

Not that FBC! herself is going to attend many openings soon (still too tiring for a physically injured Frenchy) but I am slightly better and able to pay attention a little bit more to what's going on in LA.
This weekend there's the Saturday opening of Larry Johnson's retrospective at the Hammer, an artist represented by one of the museum's donors, as well as the opening for the presentation of the collection of Dean Valentine in the same museum. Where he happens to also be a donor and to sit on the Board. It's not a real problem in itself (all museums do that) but it makes me wonder if the Hammer is also hurting financially if it needs to honor its big donors simultaneously, unless there are some scheduling advantages I'm not aware of?
I love Johnson's work but I'm not 100% certain it deserves a retrospective yet. I won't make it to the opening, but I'll try to see the show later and report here.


If you prefer something a bit more funky and less established, you can also go on Saturday night to anotheryearinla where Fallen Free is opening with "Fresh And Easy", and where you can say hi to David and Cathy Stone for me.

The other promising show will open on Sunday at 6 PM at the Glendale College Art Gallery, "Abstractionists Unite!", curated by Nancy Chaikin, with a great line-up that includes FBC! fave Mary Heilmann, as well as Rebecca Morris and Liz Larner (and plenty of others).

Have fun this weekend, and remember to drive responsively and watch out for the stupid LA drivers who don't.

Stephen Kaltenbach at Anotheryearinla

Stephen Kaltenbach was the other artist whose opening I went to on Saturday. Kaltenbach is a conceptual artist with a deep sense of humor, and FBC! has been a fan of his work since relatively late, actually, thanks to my former boss Lynn Zelevansky. Without her I wouldn't have discovered anotheryearinla and Kaltenbach's work. If by happenstance one of my reader was moneyed, I suggest you buy a nice time-capsule (absolutely randomly: "Content", OK?) and donate it to LACMA.
Kaltenbach is better-known for a series of ads in Artforum in the late 1960s, which I'd love to give you more info about but everything I have here is in hard copy, somewhere in my archives. My archives are a pile of folders, papers and books that currently look like the tower of Pisa, as I need bookshelves. It won't kill you to do a bit of research yourself anyway, so have fun doing it, it's a great artwork. Also should be a pre-requisite for all grad students entering art schools (along with Paul McCarthy's video "Painter").
For his last show he mounted a mini-retrospective of his Time Capsules that looked awesome, and witty, and if you really, really, like me you can donate that "Content" one to me and give another artwork to LACMA. I won't tell.

It was a fun opening as usual at David and Cathy Stone, and FBC! was delighted to meet artists Mark A. Rodriguez and Nadege Monchera there, as well as new art dealer Charlie James (he's opening where Telic used to be in Chinatown), Stephen Kaltenbach himself and the always delightful Peter Frank! Peter is the associate editor for new art magazine 'The" where yours truly may write in the future (NB: no website is listed on the masthead, so I'll let you Google "the", OK?). Both Peter and Stephen gave me tips for my novel, seeing they were in NYC at the right period, and following our fruitful conversation Kaltenbach himself agreed to a cameo appearance in the story. Needless to say, I'm thrilled.
Have fun going to see his show, and don't neglect to ask and see the "canceled" copy of the misprinted catalog (and buy yourself the right one when it's out, Lucy Lippard among others had written an essay). It's like those unique stamps worth tons of money by virtue of never having been put in circulation. Maybe it will end up inside a future time capsule...

Pictures: "Content", "open before my retrospective at Pompidou Center", "Only owner may open", Stephen Kaltenbach in front of "Moment", David Stone and Peter Frank. Artworks titles are approximative, I don't have the checklist with me.

Your Social Life

FBC! has been hibernating lately (all this rain, plus a nasty cold) and a bit out of it, so I neglected to help you out with this week Your Social Life. Oopsie.
So, quick, tonight you can go at Another Year In LA and don't worry about Friday night's traffic, because their openings run late. I won't be able to go, so please say hi to David and Cathy for me. Thanks!
Tomorrow is also the opening of the show curated by Michael Ned Holte at Richard Telles, where I will be absent from due to a previous social engagement, so once again please say hi to the charming Will Fowler for me! And after this? Well, you can go see the last days of the Francis Alys show at the Hammer or the Murakami show at MoCA and most importantly swing by the Glendale College Gallery for tomorrow's opening (look for Jennifer Lane and Caroline Thomas' work).
You can also go see the show Patriot Acts at 18th St. in Santa Monica. I'm fully disqualified to review that show since I have 5 friends in it, not including the curator, but before you go vote on Super Tuesday it would probably benefit you to have a refresher in what's great about American's values, when they are cherished and respected.

Next week you will have to brace for the upcoming mammoth opening of BCAM at LACMA. For the non-acronymous readers, all those initials stand for Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a mouthful isn't it? You may have seen the Jeff Koons-hatched egg plastered on banners all over town. Koons being championed by Broad in many, many of his gigantic-sized endeavors, the trademark may have seemed obvious to LACMA's Marketing Dept. but I'm afraid not so much for the rest of the city. Now you know!
Anyway, there will be a series of grandiose shindigs starting with the Gala fundraiser and then a series of openings, none of which your truly has been invited to, so I'm a bit peeved at my former LACMA colleagues. That's OK, I will report on the building and the collection once the commotion will have died down. I think I'll contrast it with the Michael Asher show at SMMOA (yay!) and then later will post the LA-provincial-versus-international text I've been working on and off for the past weeks. So if like me you are not invited, you can 1.) but the LAT Sunday, there's a 6-page spread coming up and 2.) get a free community ticket for the Feb. 16/17 weekend (I'm going at 2 PM, if you really want to know, but if there are too many people in attendance I'll flee).

Meanwhile, there's also the brunch at the Broad Foundation to present the new installation there, and I'm very excited to go because there's a Jeff Wall that must be new there, and there will be solid good stuff like Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Struth and Pierre Huygues.
To the best of my knowledge there isn't any Jeff Wall in Los Angeles' public collections, so hopefully it will trigger some desire in collectors here to buy a good one and donate it to an institution here.
I personally don't care (admittedly, I'm not a Museum Director) whether Eli Broad gives or not his collection to LACMA or any other LA museum at the moment, because:

a) he never said he was going to give it, before, during, and after the construction and opening of BCAM (hey, NYT article from a few weeks back: this is not news. The info was out and public for I don't know how long!)
b) he may change his mind later
c) even if he doesn't, the Foundation that will administer the collection may decide to donate it in parts or in its entirety in the future
d) Eli Broad isn't dead, in case you haven't noticed. If you hadn't, you probably live on Mars. Since he's very much alive, he can do as he may well please.
e) The building is great, and if it leads LA donors to pledge more money in the future to totally renovate and rebuild LACMA from scratch it would be a good idea (but please, preserve the Bing Auditorium as is).


And seriously: why is it that Eli Broad can do pretty much as he pleases in LA? It's very simple: no one else is stepping in. Where are you all the other LA billionaires when you are needed? How much do you donate to Los Angeles civic projects? To the Los Angeles public good at large? Probably not enough. Until you do, Eli reigns.