April 18, 2006
An outsider's view of Los Angeles
I've just arrived in Los Angeles, where I will stay for four days and look at as much art as I can. Coincidentally, Adrian Searle publishes his review of the Centre Pompidou's "Los Angeles 1955-85: The Birth of an Artistic Capital" in today's Guardian:
This rewarding, entertaining, often surprising exhibition is a crash course in 30 years of laconic California conceptualism, laidback LA pop art, occasionally silly and often highly confrontational performance, absurd and eccentric abstractions, funky and fetishistic minimalism, edgy, scatological sculptural tableaux, and dark and dirty underground film. They vie with one another, in room after room.
I don't know how many people would agree with this assertion:
LA's problem has always been what the exhibition's curator, Catherine Grenier, calls its "octopoid geography". Whatever New York thinks of itself (and it thinks about itself a lot), it faces Europe. LA is far away. And although there were always collectors in Los Angeles, during the 60s and 70s they did little to encourage local, much less younger talent. Hence, perhaps, the edginess and aggression, the solipsism and individuality that marks the best Angeleno art.
He goes on to make a pretty weak conclusion, but the gist is that he likes the diversity of LA art, and that the exhibition in Paris is good.
I managed four trips to LA during last year's September-to-May art season. Sadly, this is my first visit during '05-'06. I hope to make the most of it.