Charlie White, "Champion", 2005
chomogenic print, 50 x 43 1/2 inches
edition of 5 + 1 AP
Charlie White, 'Tate-LaBianca from the series Everything is American', 2005
Chromogenic print, 140 x 161.5 cm
Edition of 5 + 1 AP
Sunday
I'm on a plane from London to Los Angeles and too wound up to sleep. I keep remembering that when I land I have to hire a car and drive myself to my friend's house in Silverlake. I've never driven in the States before, I've never been to LA before and I'm used to shift as opposed to automatic...but hey - how hard can it be?
I'm on my way to stay with my friend Charlie White who's an artist. Still only 34, he has been riding high in the art world for ten years. The first work of Charlie's I came across was 'Understanding Joshua', a series of photographs from the early 2000s that featured a strange, alien creature, hopelessly awkward and completely overwhelmed by his sense of utter otherness from the 'WASPish' world that surrounds him. The series was lauded for, among other things, his powerful portrayal of crushing insecurity and self-loathing.
Charlie has recently finished a series of works called 'Everything is American'. One of the works 'Tate La Bianca' features three shaven-headed young women standing in a court-room dock. It was inspired by the trial and sentencing of three of the Charles Manson followers who went on the now infamous killing rampage in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. The work will be the cover image of Charlie's forthcoming monograph, 'Monsters', published in May.
I pick up my hire car and decide to take a sat-nav too - a good move as it turns out. After frog-hopping across the car park, and the man in the booth yelling at me to leave my left foot on the floor because I keep slamming down on the brake thinking it's the clutch, I hit the road. It takes around half an hour for me to reach the house of Charlie and his partner, the writer and editor Stephanie Ford. He looks in great shape which I'm delighted to see - last December, due to a congenital heart condition as opposed to hard living, Charlie had to have his chest opened for the fourth time, and undergo a valve replacement. Since his operation Charlie has taken to working from his bed in his dressing-gown, Hugh Heffner-style with their two dachshunds draped across his lap.
Monday
Charlie and I go to MOCA's Geffen Contemporary Space to see 'WACK!', the first major exhibition to examine the foundations and legacy of international feminist art produced between 1965 and 1980. What is particularly interesting about the exhibition is its attempt to dismantle the canonical list of American artists who have become associated with the feminist movement by showing work by women from other geographies (artists such as Ewa Partum from Poland and Ketty LaRocca from Italy, for example), or by women whose work does not share the same formal, theoretical or critical concerns that we have come to understand as constituting 'feminist art' of this period.
Andrea Zittel, installation view
After a good hour and a half at 'WACK!' we move onto MOCA's concurrent exhibition by Andrea Zittel (until 14 May). The first solo museum exhibition of Zittel's work in North America, the show is an impressively comprehensive, examining her work from 1991 to the present day, drawing in the A-Z Living Units, the A-Z Escape Vehicles, the A-Z Desert Islands and A-Z Raugh systems that examine and exemplify the ways in which personal needs - such as comfort, security and intimacy - can be achieved. In addition to the architectural environments she has created throughout her career, is a section devoted to a display of the complete series of handmade clothing that she has created to date, and a selection of drawings. More than almost any other artist living and working today, Zittel's personal and professional lives are linked by her artistic endeavours and every project is borne out of some kind of 'conundrum' she has come up against in her own life.
Zittel and Charlie were partners for a year almost a decade ago, and during their involvement he collaborated with her on A-Z Travel Trailers (if you look carefully you can spot a tiny photo of Charlie towards the end of the exhibition). As we walk past the dresses Charlie says, 'Oh, yes, I should tell you - Andrea crotchets all the time - like ALL the time, Really, she never stops'.
Tuesday
I meet up with Mihai Nicodim who runs the Kontainer Gallery, and is also one of the three founders of Chung King Project (along with Friedrich Loock from Wohnmaschine in Berlin and Nick Baker and Zoe Foster from FA Projects in London). He takes me to Chinatown and gives me a tour around Ciprian Muresan's show at Kontainer (until 5 May), and Adrian Ghenie's show at Chung King Project.
Adrian Ghenie, "Basement Feeling 2", 2007
oil on canvas, 27 1/2 x 40 inches
Ghenie and Muresan are both artists from Cluj in Romania, and I have been following their work and curating shows that include them for the past couple of years. Muresan's exhibition features a series of drawings detailing the washing of a body before it is 'laid to rest', and Ghenie's show consists of a selection of filmic black and white paintings inspired by abandoned buildings and forgotten places. A show I'm curating in Bucharest in April will travel to Kontainer in October. The show is called 'Growing Wild' and features four international women artists - Tami Ichino from Japan who is currently working in Geneva, Tessa Farmer from the UK, Janieta Eyre from Canada and Gabriela Vanga who is from Romania but currently living and working in Paris.
Gabriela Vanga, Keep it unreal, installation, Miss China Beauty Room Hiver 2 Paris, 2004
Tessa Farmer
Janieta Eyre
After lunch Mihai gives me a tour of some of the galleries around LA. We begin with Culver City and Sam Durant's show at Blum and Poe, 'Scenes from the Pilgrim Story: Myths, Massacres and Monuments'. As stated on the press release, 'the project's central function is to put the mythology of the Pilgrim Story and the interests it serves into a comparative relationship with history'. It's a quirky exhibition that recreates the Plymouth National Wax Museum for visitors, and it's a big surprise for any visitor familiar with Durant's work but who hasn't read up on this show and the ideas behind it.
Henning Kles
Sandroni Rey is showing a series of figurative paintings by Henning Kles that look as though Mr Sam has gone and taken an acid trip. Stars and stripes and super-hero cloaks are accompanied by crazed clowns, acid yellow 'smilies' and ku klux klan 'hoodies'. We run round Robert Russell at Anna Helwing and the group show at Angstrom and then climb back in the car to move onto the Wilshires. At Roberts and Tilton there's a great show of sculptures by Thomas Kiesewetter. Each twisted, almost but not quite functional-looking object appears soft and pliable whereas in actuality they're cast in bronze and unbelievably heavy.
Thomas Kiesewetter, 'Untitled #8', 2006
Bronze, edition 1/3
22.5 x 15.5 x 14.5 in
Other highlights include Charline von Hegel's exhibition of small vivid, abstract paintings at 1301 PE, and Steve di Benedetto's exhibition of drawings and paintings featuring a mélange of octopi with biomorphic pods against deep-sea and sci-fi landscapes.
Wednesday
Today I give my talk at the Roski School of Fine Arts, USC (where Charlie is the director of the Intermedia program and a member of the Graduate Core faculty). I am speaking about the young artists in Romania and Poland that I have been involved with for the past two years. I try to give a sense of the context these artists are working in, what they have achieved and how things might develop. I am passionate about the nascent art scenes in Poland and Romania and particularly involved with what is going on in Cluj in Transylvania. I spot Andrea Zittel in the audience - she also teaches at USC - armed with her latest dress and, as Charlie said, her clicking crotchet needles.
A sculptor called Nick Kramer shows me images of his studio in New York. After he moved in he found out that the apartment previously belonged to Allen Ginsberg and his partner Peter Orlovsky. It was in a dreadful state, but Nick felt a terrible sense of guilt when he started cleaning it up - as if he was somehow eliminating history - so he compromised and took lots of photographs.
Thursday
Today I fly to Austin. Lora Reynolds picks me up at the airport and we go straight to the gallery to plan out the hang. The show is called 'Eastern European Painting Now' (until 5 May) and features the work of two painters who live and work in Cluj - Adrian Ghenie and Serban Savu - and two from Poland, Wojciech Zasadni who lives and works in Warsaw, and Slawomir Elsner who currently lives and works in Berlin. Zasadni's work is really somewhere in between painting and sculpture - it takes the form of low relief woodcarving, collage and enamelled paint and it is unlike anything I have seen. Zasadni derives his inspiration from ephemeral magazine covers which he then immortalises in his hand-carved, glossy reliefs.
Wojciech Zasadni, 'George Bush', 2007
acrylic, collage and enamel on wood relief
10 1/2 x 7 3/4 x 1 inches
I really like the contrast between Zasadni's work and that of the other three painters - Ghenie's dark and filmic paintings of abandoned houses, tomb-like structures and historic moments, Savu's meticulous observations of 'ordinary' Romanians going about their business and Elsner's careful re-creations of the images he's extracted from a 30-year-old Polish magazine called 'Panorama'.
Although the gallery is still very young, Lora is gaining a reputation for spotting artists and assessing artistic developments before anyone else has really heard of them, such as when she invited the British artist, Phil Collins, to make a show in her gallery long before he was nominated for the 2006 Turner Prize.
Saturday
A good crowd turns out for the opening and people are keen to ask lots of questions about the paintings and the artists who made them. I meet Dana Friis-Hansen, the Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Austin Museum of Art (AMOA). Dana has supervised their exhibition programme and permanent collection since his arrival in February 2002 and he has spent much of his time actively working on the rehabilitation of Laguna Gloria, the museum's original home on Lake Austin. Dana has also been responsible for organizing exhibitions at AMOA'S downtown facility, including '22 to Watch: New Art in Austi'n (2002, 2005).
At the dinner after the opening I sit next to Kelly Baum, the Assistant Curator of American and Contemporary Art at The Blanton (the largest university art museum in the United States and the third largest museum in Texas), and Ursula Davila, The Blanton's Assistant Curator of Latin American Art. Ursula tells me all about 'The Geometry of Hope' show' (Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection) that is currently up at the museum. The exhibition has been curated by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro.
Sunday
Lora and I go to see 'The Geometry of Hope' at The Blanton. The exhibition is organised so as to lead the viewer on a journey through the cities of South America during the mid-20th century, and reveals the birth of Modernism and its impact on art in the Americas. The works in the show are drawn from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection - one of the world's leading collections of Latin American art - and the exhibition aims to examine the 'dynamic visual vocabulary of Geometric Abstraction that developed in the cosmopolitan art capitals of Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and other South American cities from the 1930s through the 1970s'. There are more than 125 works by over 40 artists and a scaled-down version of the exhibition is due to be shown at New York University's Grey Art Gallery in the fall of 2007.
I am struck by the impact that Joaquin Torres Garcia has made not just on Latin American art but on art in the 20th century in general. Born in Montevideo in 1874, the Uruguayan painter and sculptor was the leader of the Catalan Modernist Movement at the beginning of the 20th century and the founder of 'Circle et Carre', the first abstract group in Paris between the wars. In the twenties he fused Cubism and Constructivism in a series of paintings and books which later become known as Universal Constructivism, and along with Manuel Rendon, he is credited with bringing the Constructivist Movement into Latin America.
Leaving the exhibition I am struck again by western art history's extreme bias towards its 'own' heroes and wonder when the canon will be redressed and knowledge will widen. Shows like this certainly go a long way towards helping.
Jane Neal
Jane Neal is an Oxford-based freelance journalist and critic. Her special focus over the past year has been the developing art scene in Central and Eastern Europe. She contributes to a wide variety of international art publications.
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