Heavy Scholarly Week Is Descending Upon Us

Heya beloved readership,

As some of you know, the College Art Association Conference is descending upon Los Angeles this week, with registration already in full swing earlier today. If you've been following FBC! for a while, you know how deeply ambivalent I am about the thing.
There are two things that give me the willies in general,  art fairs and  the CAA Conference. One, I do badly with crowds - I love everybody equally on this planet, but far, far away from me - and two, I do badly with people taking themselves way too seriously.
Now, I understand the need people have to network, and that it's convenient for institutions planning to hire future tenure-bound faculty to have a general cattle call HQ, but these being precisely what I'm trying not to do, I was to avoid the thing altogether, especially since I'm being too broke to devote money to sessions dealing with the stuff I laugh about usually (see that second link I posted above).

But CAA has elegantly showed they had no hard feelings against me  for making fun of them the last time around and kindly sent me a press pass; so yours truly is going to attend a couple of sessions and then report. I won't tell you beforehand where I'll go, I keep my identity vaguely secret (see "I abhor networking above", or more plainly "FBC! is a sociopath"). Also, I still have more deadlines so the whole thing is way too much, and I just realized today I had to re-read my undergrad nemesis, Stilfragen by Alois Riegl. If you've ever read it, you will understand.

The complete program of the sessions can be found here. Note that to attend, you need to fork over the $$$ to be a CAA member (which entitles you to a subscription to either the Art Journal or the Art Bulletin. I strongly recommend the latter, unless you get the level of membership that entitles you to both journals) plus the cost of attending the conference, or you can get some single-day or even single-time slot tickets. Everything is explained here. There is ONE session that is open to everybody, I understand (please double-check with CAA):

CAA Distinguished Scholar Session Honoring Rosalind Krauss

The Theoretical Turn

Thursday, February 23, 2:30 PM–5:00 PM

West Hall Meeting Room 502AB, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center

Chair: Yve-Alain Bois, Institute for Advanced Study

Harry Cooper, National Gallery of Art

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Harvard University

Hal Foster, Princeton University

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Harvard University

Briony Fer, University College London

  

Indeed, their website is super handy, so if you're interested in attending some of the conference just spend some time on the site, everything is well-explained. Things I recommend skipping altogether: the receptions, unless you have some alumni something or other going on and you're dying to see that asshole you were in graduate school with and who's doing so well at [insert Ivy League fab job here]. Also, do not, under any circumstance, try to eat or drink anything at the Convention Center. Instead, walk over to Hygge Bakery and raid their dark rye bread, hop on a DASH bus and explore the newish downtown eateries, whatever, but don't waste your money at such a ghastly place. Speaking of the DASH, if you live in Los Angeles and can conveniently bus yourself to the Convention Center, do so to avoid the super expensive parking.

Now, glancing at the program, I'm alarmed at two things. One is purely practical: FBC! still isn't ubiquitous, so it's impossible to attend everything I'd like to go to. Sorry, Rosalind Krauss and distinguished speakers mentioned above. The other thing is there seems to be a majority of modern-to-contemporary sessions in contrast to, say, Classical Antiquity, Medieval Art, Renaissance, etc. And many, many of these modern-to-contemporary sessions are dealing with stuff that has too many -Re and -Identity and -Body in their titles. Hey, art historians in the US of A, have you noticed the 1990s ended up with the century? Anything new going on? No? Oh well.
There are a bunch of local people talking at CAA this year, so check the LA Raw session chaired by Michael Duncan on Thursday afternoon, or the Seeing Is Doing on Thursday morning with Simon Leung, Andrea Bowers, etc.


Now, that is A LOT of scholarly things going on in LA. But, it's not all! On Saturday afternoon, and unrelated to CAA, Thierry de Duve will kick off a 10-weeks seminar on Duchamp at the Mackey Apartments/MAK. The whole seminar costs $140, or you can pay $20 per session (there's a deep discount if you are a member), but this Saturday it is FREE. From 3 to 5 PM, after this the sessions will move over to Mondays, 7 to 9 PM. De Duve is one of Duchamp's foremost scholar, so this promises to be interesting.

After all these scholarly things, I feel like everybody will need to look at real art. Let me remind you that on Saturday night, For The Love Of Mike at the Farley Building will be an event showing Mike Kelley's videos for 24 hours.  MOCA has also put together its holdings of Mike Kelley's works (some of them fairly spectacular) while LACMA has done the same with its own super meager collection (3 or 4 works at most.) Please go look at Mike's art and have a thought for him and for all the works he has left us.

Hitler Learns Jeffrey Deitch Got The MOCA Job

A bit of fun to help you start the week.

Thanks to Tom Christie who posted the funniest "Hitler learns blah blah blah" video found on Youtube, and special thanks to Youtube user 334point5 for uploading it.

Where Incompetence Has Lead Us

We've read a lot about MOCA over the last few weeks. Now something my art readers here in Los Angeles may not have noticed is how incredibly bad out local paper has become, thanks to the incompetence of a zillionnaire Chicagoan who cultivates an unfortunate resemblance with a giant garden gnome, Sam Zell. Remember when Ron Burkle with Eli Broad (who wanted to run the paper as a non-profit foundation) and David Geffen were competing to buy the Los Angeles Times? They didn't succeed, and instead Uncle Scrooge grabbed our newspaper. Now, about a year later, a good hundred layoffs later, our paper gutted out of its substance, Uncle Scrooge is filling for bankruptcy.
If LA art lovers cannot imagine a town without MOCA, try to imagine it without the LA Times. I have no idea what's gonna happen to it, and if as usual everybody is going to ask Eli Broad to the rescue. If it happens, he will inherit a newspaper whose very blood has been drained, where good journalists have been replaced by bloggers, and where we have to endure the unbearable stupidity and condescension of columnist Jonah Goldberg and Joel Stein.
I remember when the LAT was a good paper, much more progressive than the NYT. It was weak on covering culture and the arts, but was really good on the environment, and was kindly inclined toward the poor. Now we're left with a lightweight paper, an impossible to search website and a gazillions poorly written blogs about real estate porn and doggie bling, thanks to Sam Zell and his incredible foresight. Now, Mr. Zell, please stop being stupid and resell our beautiful LAT to Broad or Geffen or whatever billionaire who lives here wants to buy it, and go manage your Cubs, OK? You'll do us a favor.

I found the picture here.

Walnut Caramel Tart To Soothe Your MOCA Anxiety

That's right, if you're like me you're a bit sick of all the MOCA drama, of everybody blogging his/her solutions and wondering why why why nothing happened yet? Duh, it was Thanksgiving weekend, do you expect MOCA Trustees to reach a decision at a pre-holiday brainstorming bash?
Anyway, since it's holiday season and there hasn't been any foodie-related thing posted here, I thought I should divert your worried ruminations with a festive tart recipe that was very successful last Thursday. I've also made 4 quarts of turkey stock but it doesn't look too good in pictures, so here's the tart instead.

Basic Tart Dough:

250g white flour (I use King Arthur)
125 butter
30g confectioner's sugar
1 egg
1 pinch of salt

Filling:
250g walnuts
150g sugar
35cl creme fraiche (about 2 tubs Trader Joe's creme fraiche)
30g butter
1 generous dash of rum
vanilla extract


1) mix the flour with the soft (room temperature) butter cut in small pieces, mix well until it looks sandy, ,add sugar and salt, stir well, add the egg, mix well, roll the dough into a ball, put in plastic wrap int he fridge for about 1 hour
(NB: you can mix all ingredients in a stand mixer as well, but I don't have one).

Preheat oven at 400F.
Roll out the dough, spread it in a buttered and floured pan (I use a quiche dish), pick the dough with a fork in several places, and pre-cook the dough int he oven for 20 minutes. Usually recipes recommend you spread dried beans over wax paper on the tart dough to avoid shrinking and air bubbles, but I basically fit a second, smaller metallic tart pan over the dough and it works wonders.

2) Filling.
Heat the creme fraiche in a pot. It's OK if it boils, it won't turn sour, but it's not necessary. In another tall pot, make a caramel by heating the sugar with 2 tablespoons water. The caramel is ready for the second stage when it becomes a nice light brown color and is bubbly rather than frothy. Take it out of the burner (I put it down in my sink) and add the heated creme fraiche. WATCH OUT it's very, very hot. Wait for the projections to subside so you can mix the creme fraiche more thoroughly with the caramel. Put the caramel melange back on the stove, stir with your wooden spoon, when the caramel makes big bubbles, take it out of the stove, wait a minute or two, add the rum and the vanilla, stir well. Throw the walnuts into the caramel, stir well so each walnut is entirely coated with caramel. Normally you obtain a large mass of walnut and caramel, and a bit of liquid caramel stays at the bottom of the pan.
Pour the walnut/caramel mixture on the pre-baked tart dough, level the top with a spatula. Try to tilt the tart mold sideways a couple of time so the liquid caramel stays equally level. Put everything back in the oven for 10 minutes, still at 400F.
Let the tart cool off to before eating it. Rather than add more sweetness to it, if you absolutely feel like having some dairy when eating it I'd suggest you do so with a dollop of creme fraiche, rather than whipped cream or ice cream. Enjoy, and stop thinking about MOCA for a few minutes, OK?

Petition For MOCA

OK, full disclosure, FBC! generally doesn't believe in petitions, and doesn't sign them as a general principle. Rules are made to be broken, so my signature graces the petition to "save MOCA", which you can find here. So if you care about the museum, you can sign it and pass the url to your friends. I must say I'm a bit irritated my full mailing address was required to sign it, as I had no time and no imagination to make up a fake one.

Now this being said, feel free to make as much noise as possible to help the museum, and after it's saved thanks to Eli Broad, to many more generous donors to come and to viewers like you, please ask for accountability. I love MOCA, I love many of the exhibitions it has organized, I like all its curators, it has a great collection, but it needs better management, and that includes administrators as well as the Board of Trustees. You know, people who try to improve the financial situation of the institution way before it drowns in a dire, dire quagmire of near-bankruptcy. The 11th-hour cry for help, the waiting for the museum to be in desperate straits to finally, finally make the situation known, I find it intolerably nerve-wracking.

Meanwhile, sign the petition, make your voice heard, and support your local museums. All of them.

MOCA Crisis Reminder: 3 PM Meeting At the Geffen

For all of you who wish to show support for MOCA in this time of crisis, you're invited to show up at 3 PM at the Geffen. Please kindly pay the full admission fee, even if you are a member or ar otherwise entitled to free admittance as a professional.
The meeting organizers, artists Cindy Bernard and Diana Thater, would like to remind everybody this isn't a town hall meeting nor a Q&A to address grievances, neither are you asked to air proposals about the museum's future. It is a rally of support for the museum, so please don't make the meeting morph into a shouting match of confusing ideas, and follow the agenda set by the organizers.
Please note the agenda of the meeting below.
Lastly, FBC! is sorry she cannot attend, but I can hardly move today as a consequence of the Great LA Walk (it was awesome!), so it's physically impossible for me to be there. But I'll welcome anybody who want to report.
Thanks, and go support MOCA!

agenda:

1. Welcome / Cindy Bernard and Diana Thater
2. Remarks / George Baker
3. A reading of an artist statement of support / Cindy Bernard and Diana Thater
4. Remarks / Representative from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs
5. Remarks / Richard Jackson
6. Comments from attendees
7. Walk through of “Index: Conceptualism in California from the Permanent Collection” / George Baker

Thanks, Updates And Corrections

FBC! is a bit frazzled right now, and grieving and really sad, and the result is I cannot remember everything or keep up with the current MOCA drama. So this post is here first of all to thank everybody who has sent me messages, some of them very touching. I've been stunned and moved to get supportive and sweet emails from total strangers as well as from all friends. It's been very helpful, so my heartfelt gratitude goes to all of you. Thank you so much.

Secondly, I received the invite way too late to post it on YSL, so here's the update: there's an opening at the Glendale College Gallery this Saturday. It's called Endless Summer and is curated by Alex Israel, in conjunction with the California Biennial. If you go, please say hi to Alex for me, and to the Gallery Director Roger Dickes as well.

Now, the corrections: I was saying on the precedent post regarding MOCA that I doubted Eli Broad would play Santa Claus, and I was wrong. He's ready to step in, as long as other people do it as well. If you read the (short) editorial he wrote for the LAT, it's pretty good (I'm happy he mentions the WACK! exhibition among the groundbreaking ones organized at MOCA). I like the bit where he says "This is not a one-philanthropist town". In effect, so far it is, but it stands to reason Broad should be weary of always been called to the rescue, and it's not normal that on a city where so many wealthy people live, so few of them contribute to the arts. Where are the movie stars who show up at MOCA's openings when it's time to take out their wallets?
In any case, please still show up at Sunday's meeting at the Geffen (3 PM) if you can. FBC! absolutely cannot make it, but I'd be happy to post or re-post accounts of the meeting. In passing, I'll be away from the computer for the next 48 hours, so it's better you either join the Facebook group mentioned in the preceding post, or check For Your Art (sign up for their email newsletter). Both are updated frequently.
Meanwhile, goodbye, let's reconnect after Thanksgiving. Thank you all.

The picture of the Roni Horn had been taken at MoMA, not at MOCA. Sorry.

Don't Ask What MOCA Can Do For You, Ask What YOU Can Do for MOCA

If you care about MOCA's fate - and you should - you can either join the Facebook group, or better yet go on Sunday afternoon to the talk at 3 PM at the Geffen. George Baker was originally scheduled to do a Q&A about conceptualism and has graciously accepted to donate his time to organize a discussion/discuss organization of what can be done. FBC! won't be able to go, but encourages you to do so and report.
Everyone seems to want for Santa Claus to step in and bailout the museum to avoid a merger with LACMA, which would be great if Santa existed (do you think Eli Broad looks like Santa? Er, no. David Geffen? Even less. The Resnicks maybe?). I hope that whoever would bail out the Museum will ask for fiscal responsibility and better management. And shake the Board of Trustees, and find another director, possibly. Meanwhile, let's do a Barack Obama-style grassroot campaign and ask for someone at the museum to post an account # where people could donate money. Maybe artists could donate artworks to do a live auction. Maybe Los Angeles art dealers could contribute to that general fund. Brady Westwater over at LA Cowboy wants the Getty to step in (why not?) and build a photography museum downtown in conjunction with MOCA (won't happen, methinks). Any ideas are welcome at this point, I guess. Anyway, whatever is done, let's support MOCA!

Your Social Life While MOCA Still Exists

So as I said yesterday the MOCA drama is taking front page and continuing. Christopher Knight In Shining Armour is reporting on it, and Tyler Green over at MAN is imagining all sorts of solutions. It's interesting to think about a concerted Getty-LACMA-Broad bailout, but I'm not sure that:
a) it's legally possible for the Getty to fork over some money for that purpose (it may well be, but I don't know anything about it),
b) LACMA sure doesn't have the money for acquiring the collection at its current value, and if it did it would be at such a discount you'd want to weep over the waste that happened
and
c) Eli Broad? really? it would be a great opportunity for him to actually act as the philanthropist he thinks he is, but hhhhmmm, somehow I don't see it happening, at least not in a way that would satisfy all parties involved.

The idea of MOCA ceding its collection for cash to bail itself out and become an exhibition-only space is lugubrious. If only because, when you want to stage large-scale exhibitions of international renown, you need your collection as currency to obtain loans. I'm sure if LACMA was to get into a shared-collection scheme with MOCA to bail them out, they would oblige in lending out (as collateral, so to speak), but what if it conflicts with their own loan exchanges? Unpractical at best.

In any case, if I were you I'd run over to MOCA this weekend to go see the Kippenberger retrospective, or the Louise Bourgeois one if you're inclined that way (being French, I've seen at least 3 Bourgeois retrospective sin my lifetime, so I'll give it a pass). I sure hope the museum's Dan Graham retrospective (initially scheduled to open at the Geffen, now at Grand Avenue) will still be held in February.
Whatever the fate that awaits MOCA, when everything will be said and done, someone should look at why and how the practice at dipping in the endowment while expanding staff and exploding budget had been allowed, and by whom. It's nice to blame the trustees, but the blame should be shouldered by the museum's administration as well.


Aside from giving MOCA a cautionary glance this weekend, there are lots of other options. First of all tomorrow evening is Groupshow Without Andre Butzer, an artist-curated exhibition filled with FBC! pals. 1711 N Spring Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 (enter at back on Baker Street). It starts at 8 PM and is a 2-day affair which I'll be unable to attend as I've got other obligations.
At exactly the same time tomorrow, if you're in Eagle Rock you can go attend LA Lit: Clouds at the beautiful Eagle Rock Center for The Arts. It's a two-day conference on everything literary and experimental in Los Angeles, and includes some performances by the likes of Teresa Carmody.
Saturday evening at Otis is the closing reception for When It's A Photograph, from 6 to 8 PM, with the likes of Marnie Weber (hi Marnie!), Paul Sietsema, James Welling, Doug Aitken, etc.
And Sunday evening, what are you guys doing? Phone banking for MOCA? Yup, that would be nice, but I have a feeling instead you're going to attend the opening of Sundays Gallery, with Michael Rashkow, Eli Langer and Rowan Wood.
Life goes on on Tuesday when, if in Van Nuys, you can attend Doug Harvey's Mouldy Slide Show from 8 to 9PM at Los Angeles Valley College. Click on the link for the exact info.
If you happen to be in London next week instead of celebrating Thanksgiving, I conjure you to go attend the opening of Sphinxx curated by FBC! special pal Alexis Vaillant, at Stuart Shave's Modern Art gallery.

FBC! will attend none of these. Not only because I'm still grieving, but also because I've signed up for this and I'm pretty sure I won't be in any sort of shape to attend and socialize at any art thing this weekend.
Lastly, there won't be any YSL next week, and I'm not sure I'll post anything anyway, but I'll be back for certain on the first week of December.

Pics: Doug Harvey's Mouldy Slide stolen from his blog.

MOCA Is In Trouble And So Are We

I was not going to post anything today, as I'm still very sad and clearly, I don't care that much about what's going on in the world right now. But I've been reading the news, to try to think about something else, and bam! of course stuff happens in the art world every day.
Like all of you, I had a look at the NYT this morning and frankly, whether Eli Broad wants to litter the Los Angeles cityscape with yet another museum bearing his name is the least of my preoccupations today. Seriously, why the NYT bothers that much about Eli Broad, I wonder? Does the LAT routinely covers the coming and goings of the art-inclined billionaires back East? OK, they don't have any journalists anymore left at the LAT now, so I guess they have to resort to putting up useless blogs about doggie bling and whatnots on their website, but still, I've yet to see a series of articles stalking every art decision made by, say, Steve Cohen. Or, let's be bold, Francois Pinault in Europe.

Instead, the LAT finally, now, today, writes about the open secret everybody has known about in this town for the last several years: MOCA, like Detroit's Big Three, is now running out of cash. It's been operating in the negative for a while, and everybody knows that the museum has had a fundraising problem for a long, long time. There was a bit of a boring article this morning, and now Christopher Knight, our local Crusader For The Arts comes with a column admonishing MOCA's Trustees to get their checkbooks out. Which is nice, and I'm sure everybody is connecting the dots about Broad wanting to create yet another modern/contemporary art space in Los Angeles, as if the cultural landscape needed it. You know: MOCA, LACMA, the Hammer, SMMOA, oh cool, let's create another museum, we don't have enough to see around here.

Now like all art people in LA I'd be devastated if MOCA had to close its doors and go bankrupt. Unlike GM, MOCA cannot go to Congress to ask for a bailout, so it has to find different solutions. I understand the call for more money right now, urgently, and if I were to win the Mega-Millions tomorrow I'd gladly give some. I agree with Knight, the Trustees do have to step up to the plate and save the museum, ands its collections. It would be a shame for the collection to be sold off and dispersed, or merged with another institution that's already out of space. Clearly Los Angeles needs MOCA to stay on, if only to promote itself as a cultural haven for the tourist industry (it's killing me, how the city fails to promote the art and architecture here).

But if I were a Trustee I'd ask for a bit of fiscal responsibility as well. Does MOCA need an outpost at the Pacific Design Center? Can MOCA shave off some of its expenses? Now, having worked in countless big institutions myself, some of which had to go through budget freezes, hiring freezes, salary freezes and salary cuts, I understand how horrible it is for the personnel in place, and how it breeds poor employee morale.
But for the sake of the institution and the sake of the art it is duty-bound to preserve, these are necessary fiscal steps to take. Postponing some big shows, reducing some of the staff, extending the run of some exhibitions, freezing acquisitions, trimming off publications expenses and marketing executives salaries sounds like things that should be done.
Then as a putative Trustee I'd take a hard look at my board, and at my Director, and I would ask the Chairman and the Board to maybe, maybe go look and expand the board with more moneyed and more willing members. I'd ask for recruiting a kick-ass development team with outstanding fundraising abilities and a verifiable track record in the visual arts. Maybe I'd want to second the current director, who everyone likes as the true art person he is, with a charismatic President -cum-money person.

And if, through collective checkbook-opening, belt-tightening operations I'd manage to see MOCA collectively saved, I would try to give it back its shine and prestige by trying to redefine its position in a city that now hosts so many contemporary art spaces. No doubt half of the galleries in LA will close in the next couple of years, and that the art that will emerge from the area's art schoola will be a whole lots smarter, more interesting, more challenging than whatever the market has favored as "Los Angeles Art" for the last 5 or 6 years.
If LACMA is for families, the Hammer for cutting-edge artists, and SMMOA for the most innovative alternative shows (seriously, I love what they do, it's the smartest exhibition program around with OCMA) then maybe MOCA should stayon as the Blue Chip haven its collection determines it to be.
Blue Chip doesn't mean they have to go all Ab-Ex and Pop Art on us, as there's lots of wiggle room for conceptual art, European artists and whatever irreverent contemporary art as long as it's semi-historical. By which I mean, you know how American museums need the Europeans to validate, say, Smithson, Matta-Clark or Thek 15 years before curators dare show them here? Well, screw the 15 years validation period, and bring the European-made retrospectives here as well. MOCA could even pioneer the European model of co-curating between institutions, instead of circulating "take" shows that are ready-made elsewhere. Heck, they could even pay independent curators to organize shows. How do you think European institutions save on staff expenses? Of course it breeds a shitload of dubiously qualified freelance curators on the market, but on the other hand it brings on more diversity in the exhibition programs.

Lastly, I think it would behoove the region at large to have some kind of conference between the County, cities and cultural institutions, about the kind of cultural landscape it needs and can support. If you go to Paris, you have a gazillion institutions that opened over the last 30 years, all competing with each others because at some point, the need has been felt to open a new space to counteract the perceived conservatism of the reigning champion: the Musee D'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris saw the Pompidou Center which saw the Jeu de Paume which saw the Palais de Tokyo which saw Le Plateau open (and for the private side, the Cartier Foundation and La Maison Rouge).
Why the creation of so many art spaces? Because there's not enough turnover in institutions where curators and the rest of the personnel routinely stay in place for 15, 20 years.
You cannot eternally divert or contain resentment of the younger, more alternative, different art lovers who don't find a space in the institution which, to maintain itself and its financial base, has to morph into blue chip flagship sooner or later. Museums, whatever their sources of funding, have to attract enough of a broad audience to legitimate their existence (or they're dubbed elitist) while remaining trendy enough, intellectual enough, scholarly enough, or they risk becoming yet another annex of the Universal City Walk.
So the solution in Paris as in Los Angeles, has been to open new spaces as time went by and arts crowds became more demanding, instead of reforming the institutions from the inside.
The result is a bevy of spaces competing with each other for the same financial pie. It's cool for museum goers to have a large choice of options on the weekend, but maybe it would befit everybody to have a clearer definition of what museum does what, and hire the curators the more apt to accordingly develop the specificities needed at any given museum. A good museum director should be able to pick up curators who not only have the right qualifications and pedigree, but also the ones whose taste doesn't necessarily match the rest of the curatorial team's.
Taste, oopsie, I dropped the T-Bomb. You know, that thing you're not supposed to talk about at acquisition meetings. It's as dirty in the museum world as Janet Jackson's nipples on TV, and as prominently displayed under some transparent disguises (history, scholarship, bras).

It's very simple, really, this taste problem, and by saying so I'm reflecting conversations I had with non-contemporary art visitors, and people who are not your run-of-the-mill-artsy-fartsy-mindfucks. It's a bit boring when you travel and you see the same art everywhere in every museum you visit. Does every museum has to be like Marfa? Does every single space has to look like the Broad? Should every Modern collection reflect MoMA's pioneering spirit?
You know, its like when you go to Germany and every museum has a big Beuys installation, a series of large Warhols from the 1960s, some Gerhard Mertz, a Bruce Nauman here, a few Richter there, let's add a Paik somewhere and a bit of the Becher elsewhere. Granted, these can all be awesome, but after 5 museums you long for a tiny little unknown drawing, something you've never seen anywhere.
Now if museums were to recruit curators with a lot different tastes and a bit more curiosity, and let them experiment a little, maybe they would attract and develop a larger audience and a better fan base. It would justify all the public and private money that's sunk into them for the future generations to know what art looked like in the early 21st century, in all its diversity. It's all very well to blame modernism on Clement Greenberg, but it's a bit silly. It wouldn't have hurt MoMA's curators to travel a bit and look elsewhere.

Likewise, curators could start to think in terms of what they can bring to the city, to the institutions, and to the artists, rather than think in terms of what's best for their career. They could be a whole lot more intelligent in terms of not appropriating ideas from their colleagues and underlings if they knew they could develop their own without risking to spend the next 5 years uniquely relegated at menial tasks (deaccession anyone?). Hell, they could even give proper credit to people who work with them! In any case, if curators were more aware of their own taste and not trying to hide it behind critical theory and whatever scholarly material they've been stuffed with at colleges, they could be less insecure in letting others develop different ideas and show work that they don't like themselves, but that attracts a new audience capable of supporting the museums in times of crisis.


Will we see the artists, art students, writers, collectors, art dealers and curators of Los Angeles rally to support MoCA? I'm not sure about it, but if they do, and if the museum is saved from bankruptcy, I hope they will ask for a serious rethinking of the contemporary art landscape in the region.

Picture lifted from this site.

This Was So Not Happening - Kaprow at the Geffen

Last weekend I continued my lucky streak of hitching rides to art events and ended up at the MoCA Allan Kaprow public opening. The evening had started greatly, with dinner with friends in Silverlake. Great company, great conversation, good food, everything that put me in a great mood and eager to see what MoCA was going to do out of Kaprow.
Disclaimer: I am not a Kaprow specialist whatsoever. I did teach a class or two on Fluxus in the past, have seen some Kaprow works here and there, know about how seminal he's been not only to performance artists the world over but also as a teacher, especially here in Southern California. But I certainly don't know his work in deep, so I was eager to learn more.
As a matter of fact, a few years ago when Kaprow was still alive and the venerable institution I worked for was scratching its brains to show more Los Angeles/Southern California-based artists in its program (because, there's a shortage of good artists in the region, right?); I did suggest to my then-boss to do something with him, maybe even a retrospective as I didn't know whether he already had one or not. The answer I got was a typical "oh his work isn't that good anymore".
It's even more typical he got a big show in Los Angeles after his death. Ah well, the vagaries of curating contemporary art in the US...
[Speaking of which, I'm waiting for the Los Angeles curator who's going to reconcile all sides of the Douglas Huebler Estate and organize a great retrospective. It sounds right Ann Goldstein's alley. Now that would be a public service exhibition. Ann, encore un petit effort!].

So I was all excited to get to the Geffen and see what was being done with Allan Kaprow. In effect, MoCA had asked a few LA artists to re-create/re-interpret some of Kaprow's Happenings. The result was... extremely confusing.
There is a row of early paintings that nobody was looking at, but which are probably going to be the regular audience favorite pieces once they walk in and the cacophony of the opening has died out. The show comes out of Chris Dercon's turf (Dercon was a very hot curator in the 1990s, and now, well...) and from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, an institution I like most particularly. I suppose that as curated in Europe, in cities far smaller and less spread out than Los Angeles, the concept of having volunteers "reinventing" early happenings was working out rather well, and it probably was possible for the public to go to as many events as possible. But as played out in Los Angeles, it's hard to grasp what really is at stakes.

For one thing it is hard to comprehend, when you walk into the Geffen, that a bunch of events are being re-created elsewhere in the city. The museum's website is more practical and I'd recommend you have a look before you hop to Little Tokyo.
The other thing is the way the show is laid out, the retrospective aspect isn't overtly obvious. I remember walking out with some art people and discussing how the whole thing seemed totally disrespectful of Kaprow's memory, amateurishly mounted and not historically explicative.
There is certainly a paradox in wanting to see wall labels and elaborate didactics to explain the whats and the whys of an artist whose work was experimental, collaborative and free, but as is the show is not understandable for a lay person. The general feeling was repeated over and over by every single person I ran into that evening "This is so not happening". I must have heard it a dozen times, and joke aside it rang totally true.

There was a series of "early Environments reinterpreted by artists John Baldessari and Skylar Haskard, Allen Ruppersberg, and Barbara T. Smith; projects by artists Paul McCarthy and Suzanne Lacy with Peter Kirby and Michael Rotundi" in the main exhibition space.
Some volunteers were wearing cling wrap film while moving around blue furniture, and I'm saddened to report no one really looked at them, and they looked like they had no ideas what they were doing. Someone was calling or pretending to call from an phone booth, people were typing stuff on typewriter, or writing on apples (I did that too). There were some B&W projections on the wall of historical documents, but they were lost in the general chaos. There was a sentiment of utter confusion, everyone looked dead serious, and the result of audience participation gave, hmmm, somewhat boring results.

It's the same type of thing that happened when Nicolas Bourriaud resurrected participative art in the 1990s under the theoretically weak banner of "relational aesthetics". Basically, you just have to quote Beuys on "Everyone is an artist", and you look at the results. In the 21st Century, it gives us Web 2.0, with high, half-naked kids babbling on Myspace, error-ridden Web encyclopedias written by just anybody ("Hi! I'm Just Anybody Without Credentials and I'm going to give you the lowdown on Fractals! My sources are this great little leaflet published by the Church of Scientology in 1963, and my cousin's explanations. He's taking AP math classes at Levittown High!"), and YouTube entry after YouTube entry of terrible musicians, singers and actors persuaded they're going to change the world. Or find success, whichever comes first.

Yes, everyone can participate and make art, but is it good? Can good art result from self-expression? Does self-expression have a resounding impact and meaning for the viewer or spectator? Can it be not boring?
Most people, given the chance to express themselves, alas reveal a great poverty of thoughts and reflections. The messages on those apples ranged from the sweet but banal "I love you" to the boring and banal "it sucks". So public participation didn't yield fascinating results. Not speaking about that part of the audience that doesn't want to participate. It's surprisingly large.
The results seem a bit mitigated. I have no doubts the volunteers on Saturday had a great time trying to "reinvent" happenings and events, but to look at it felt sad and depressing. A few people I met who are involved in future re-creations even expressed their frustration at how un-historically conceived the whole thing was, and also at being asked to volunteer. A tiny fee would have been a nice gesture in expressing the institutions gratitude for what is, in essence, free work performed by the people, some of whom are professional artists and as such deserve to make a living.

My fellow opening-goers (most of them artists, with yours truly, one foodie IT person and one gallery person being the exceptions) and I concurred on how not interesting the event was, and we were somewhat remembering the heydays of Rirkrit Tiravanija's fame, when he was cooking curry at his openings, and the day after all the regular audience got to see was smelly, crusty leftover. There was no after party for the unlucky, paying public, just a sense of having been robbed of whatever had happened the evening (or several days or weeks) before. The other topics of discussions were about how the same LA institutions (MoCA, LACMA, the Getty) that asked local artists to volunteer or reinvent the Kaprow happenings wouldn't be caught dead asking the same people to show their own work within their walls. And how lacking in imagination the same institutions are, all asking contemporary artists to curate/interpret/design/showcase older art, as if it was always fitting. Your truly has curated one show like this in the past, and collaborated on another one along the same lines, so I'm guilty as everyone else who's doing it now.
But I think to do so legitimately and successfully you have to sit down and think about it and try very hard to match relevant artists who have stuff to say about the others' work. I don't see much sense in sending a "general appeal to the community" about reinventing an artist's work, especially when the artist isn't here anymore to give a few directions, express his approval or his displeasure at how things are conducted. And given what we've seen last Saturday, I doubt any of us was willing to attend any other Happening "reinvented".

So to conclude our evening, we went out sagely to a famous FroYo outpost (no, the other one) and had a great discussion about post-punk rock roller derbies, food, mink skeletons hanging from trees in Canadian forests, food, freak shows and cabaret acts in Silverlake, food, and owls severing pigeons wings in the California High Desert. And food. All in all, a conversation Kaprow might have enjoyed.

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.

Your Social Life

So there's not much on the art front this weekend but the benefit auction for LAXart, Lauri Firstenberg's non-profit exhibition space in Culver City (click on the above link for all the info you need) . If you can afford it, by all means go, since LA is cruelly bereft of enough of these kinds of initiative/spaces. LAXart has been consistently showing great exhibitions by LA (and non-LA) artists and should be allowed to continue without financial hindrances.


It's all very well, you're going to tell me, but one benefit auction doesn't fill the entire weekend. What else could you do?
Well, forget Culver City and Chinatown and have a look at the Bruce Conner show at Michael Kohn, and absolutely go see the drawing show at Steve Turner. It is very, very good. Turner's website isn't updated, for those of you who don't know the gallery it is directly across the street from LACMA West. A little detour by Regen Projects to go see Glenn Ligon (I haven't seen the show yet) wouldn't hurt.
That's for your Saturday.

Sunday, after a detour at your local Farmers Market to load on all those healthy veggies, you can start with reading Julie Lequin brand new blog, and then go visit the Francis Alÿs show at the Hammer. I haven't seen the Murakami show at the Geffen yet and somehow I'm totally dragging my feet: just a look at this doesn't make me want to go.

And now it is Sunday evening, most good restaurants are closed, what can you do? I'd recommend a nice round of drinks with your pals to fortify yourself when Monday's WGA strike starts. Brace yourself for something thats supposed to affect about 200,000 workers in The Other Cultural Industry, and by ricochet all of us. If you're gainfully employed and make money, invite your writer friends for dinner and donate them some comfortable shoes and adequate clothing for their picketing shifts. Good luck to our slaves cousins in The Other Cultural Industry. We wish you many happy residuals.

Art people, please note this doesn't affect already produced PBS Art 21 series, and my friend Sal Reda nicely reminds us that in 2 weeks from now, on Sunday, November 18, the series focuses on 2 great artists who came out of Baal's mouth LA's graduate schools: the absolute genius Catherine Sullivan, who now lives mostly in Chicago (Catherine, we miss you lots) and the great, great Mark Bradford (in every sense of the term, since Mark hovers above us with 6'11" of pure talent)!


Picture above: Catherine Sullivan
The Chittendens, 2005
© The artist
Courtesy Catherine Bastide, Brussels and Metro Pictures, New York, via the Tate Modern website.

Bulletin Board

Hi my devoted readership,

apologies for very light posting lately, and thanks for your kind inquiries regarding my health. I'm in fact much better if not 100% back to normal, since I've stepped up the physical therapy/neckbrace wearing/swimming regimen. I am now able to do more things and I have of course a backlog of errands/paperwork/real work to tackle and therefore less time to blog, plus I still get tired easily.

The Grand Tour post should appear tonight hopefully, and more art stuff later (my non-foodie readership has been protesting there wasn't enough art on FBC!).
So to make you patient a little bit, just a few openings this week:

. The Cosima von Bonin show at MoCA, curated by Ann Goldstein. Should be very, very interesting. Von Bonin is not as well-known here as she should, so please flock in mass to discover her work. As usual: VIPs on Thursday, hoi polloi on Saturday. I won't attend either (post physical therapy it's hard for me to stand up for too long) but please say hi to Ann for me. Thanks! There's also Gordon Matta-Clark opening at the same location. I love Matta-Clark's works, but after seeing the show at the Whitney this Spring, and reminiscing from the 1990s European retrospective (yes, in Europe curators are always 10 years ahead of the US, cf.Robert Smithson) I think now his work is better preserved in film and book form. It can only be experienced as a document, rather than as an artwork.

. Richard Hawkins at Richard Telles this Friday. I'm far from being a Hawkins fan (I do find his works derivative, though his painting is better than the collages/photoshop works he is mainly known for) but many of my friends like him, so go support him. The sculptures look interesting actually, but the collages, hmmm, despite his use of a great Kouros (you know I'm a sucker for Greek art). I also like Richard Telles programming a lot, but parking so definitively sucks there I wished he would move his gallery elsewhere. And close later!

. Lari Pittman at Regen Projects.

. It opened last week, but Ruben Ochoa's show is up at Susanne Vielmetter. Susanne Veilmetter currently represents Ruben as well as Edgar Arceneaux, two of Los Angeles most promising artists of their generation. I wish she would represent Mark Bradford too!

. And all these artists have already exhibited in some way or other at LAXart, where Michael Queenland is having an opening too this Saturday. LAXart has also shown my old friend Vincent Johnson this Summer, but I unfortunately missed his show as I was in Europe.

That's enough for your art social life of the week, no?

I've stolen that pic from another blog, you artsy-fartsy people will recognize a certain bar. Which I in fact dislike: too uncomfortable and noisy, and wine is unspeakable and expensive (compared to beer, which I dislike). And the crowd, arrgh. Art people are wayyyyy too serious and full of themselves.

Sandinavian Chic

One thing I've learned about being in constant pain and exhausted -aside from making me whiny and cranky- is trying to cope by diverting my few short episodes of good concentration in a few directions.
I understand now what all these teenagers with lots of time on their hands are doing on YouTube, Myspace et alii. Or even how blogs are started, for example!
So I've been spending a bit of time revisiting artworks I like, looking for videos, etc. There's only one video of Jesper Just on YouTube (I'll let you look for it, it would sadden me to infringe Just's copyrights by posting it here), and there is his website. He also has a Myspace page, in case you were wondering.

Just's works were shown at the Hammer a year ago, a wonderful opportunity for the LA public at large to discover the work of a youngish and very talented Danish artist. His videos are very gay and somewhat on the campy side, and they are also very beautiful and touching.
Most of them are musical variations on impossible love, loneliness and sadness , tinged with the right amount of humor and lightness that makes them very attractive. He's one of my favorite artists of the moment and I'm a bit sad I haven't any project where his works would fit in.
In my mind he is one of the only current artist who understands the legacy of Bas Jan Ader, for instance. Obviously the same performativity is present, as well as the humor BJA was displaying in his photographs and videos, the same contrived sense of staged drama balanced with gracious playfulness. And always, always the very beautiful singing... It could be very cheesy and campy but serves as the structural element that keeps everything together.

What I like about Just is something we can find also in the work of some other artists from Scandinavia, an intelligent understanding of the art of the last 40 years that doesn't shy away from Pop Culture but without elevating the latter at the only common ground to make art, all of this with humor and playfulness.
Aside from BJA, the stagey-ness of his work is something assimilated, say, from James Coleman or Jeff Wall, with a bit of another artist I adore, Jeremy Deller.
There's something a bit similar with Jeppe Hein (also born in Denmark), whose take on Minimal Art and Postminimalism is also informed by relational aesthetics* with a bit of added fun, and to attach another car to the relational aesthetics train there's the well-known Helsinki Complaint Choir, the brainchild of a Finnish artist and her German husband (I'm YouTubing this one in another post).

Lastly, what I really like about these artists I am mentioning is how professional and polished their works all look. There's none of the amateurish sloppiness that sometimes mars the work of artists I would love to like (say, Patti Chang).
I wish we could see more of this type of art in LA, most specifically in commercial art galleries. These tend to be too much painting-centric here or too object-oriented, but in a way that is so retrograde I sometimes wonder how the young LA artists are going to have a clear idea of what's going on in the wide world, and also how collectors can build (intellectually and historically) valuable collections if the information is missing.
I mean, Just and Hein are pretty successful in Europe, they show in big galleries and are presumably selling, so what's the problem here? Too many grad students competing for space? Provincial art dealers?



The image to illustrate this post is a still from Jesper Just, It Will All End Up In Tears, 2006, copyright J. Just. It's my favorite Just so far.


*Nicolas Bourriaud, I like you very much personally but I wish you had crafted a more elegant name for the kind of art you described (and been a bit more historical, but that's my inner super-nerd talking).