Francis Alys at the Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Book-ending a year of notable Los Angeles exhibitions are two impressive museum presentations by Mexico-city based artist, Francis Alys. Early in the year, the Hammer hosted the artist's first large scale U.S. survey, Politics of Rehearsal, offering viewers a full-bodied taste of Alys' layered and conceptual practice. On-view into 2009 is Alys' striking installation Fabiola--a gallery filled floor to ceiling with representations of the crimson-shrouded saint--un-ceremoniously hidden among LACMA's permanent collection of European art. That Alys should have such sound institutional support in Los Angeles is particularly telling of the city's long history of fostering conceptual practices.
Guy de Cointet at Overduin and Kite
Dealers Kristina Kite and Lisa Overduin continually surprise with their sharp and clearly defined vision and programming that stages the pulse of current art making alongside its vital but often under-recognized past. Their presentation of Guy de Cointet is a case in point; the pair orchestrated a restaging of the late Los Angeles-based artist's 1976 performance At Sunrise...A Cry Was Heard in collaboration with the work's original actress, Mary Ann Duganne. The captivating performance was followed by the exhibition of several key paintings amassed from the artist's estate and private collections, which have rarely been seen together.
Globetrotters at Cottage Home Gallery
As the inaugural exhibition for Chinatown's new collaborative exhibition space Cottage Home, Globetrotters offered a thorough sampling of artworks by key Los Angeles artists who are barely on the brink of "mid-career." Represented were Katie Grinnan, Evan Holloway, Jason Meadows, Pentti Monkkonen, Amy Sarkisian, Eric Wesley and John Williams. For each artist, curator Katie Brennan (of Sister gallery) selected a representative sculpture from the 1990s as well as a recent work demonstrating the sustained talent in this "school" of west coast artists.
Allan Kaprow at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
'Allan Kaprow: Art As Life' was perhaps the ultimate manifestation of the 2008 trend of exhibitions that concerned conceptual, performance and non-object based art. Perhaps as a remedy to a year marked both by an over-inflated art market and economic collapse, these sorts of curatorial experiments were most welcome. MOCA gathered and presented a substantial collection of archival material surrounding the beloved late L.A. artist as well as oversaw the restaging of over 20 of Kaprow's most notable happenings. The ambitious project engaged the public and the art community on an authentic level that reminded us of the profound potential of art making.
Vishal Jugdeo at LAXART
The title of Vishal Jugdeo's impressive video installation, 'Surplus Room', is a straightforward title for a fantastically oblique work; the installation is an almost excessive conflation of recognizable tropes--theater, melodrama, structuralism, video art, tromp l'oeil--that spill out of the space of the screen and into a series of weirdly figurative, prop-like sculptures. As this is the artist's first notable exhibition in Los Angeles, I am eager to see what he will construct for us in 2009.
Margie Schnibbe at Circus Gallery
Margie Schnibbe brings a cutting and current feminist perspective to the typically male-dominated world of pornography while asserting that sex should be fun and look good. Adult videos are a lucrative side of Schnibbe's practice and another--which includes drawing, painting, sculpture and installation--was brazenly on-view at her solo show at Circus last spring. Here, the objectification was not of bodies, but of material stuff; furry sewn cushions, macramé lamp shades, fantastic domestic interiors and sex-toy table settings were fashioned into a pleasurable exploitation of craft.
Tillman Kaiser at Honor Fraser
Tillman Kaiser's abstract canvases and sculptures are at once futuristic, vintage and surprisingly fresh. Rendered in repeating geometric patterns and muted colors, his images are like pseudo-scientific patterns and arrays that nearly refer to some quantifiable data while remaining entirely mystical. Don't Worry About The Motion On The Ocean was the young Austrian artist's first U.S. exhibition and it was a memorable one at that.
John Williams at Sister Gallery
In these two memorable performances, LA-based artists John Williams (who was also featured in Globetrotters earlier in the year) set his small sculptures whirling into motion while orchestrating a minimal soundtrack of scratchy, droning vinyl. Trashy little assemblages--composed of colorful cast-off plastic objects, cheaply made toys, colored filters, party bows, pipe-cleaners--affixed to 45s twirled away on turntables while slide projectors cast shadows and refracting light over the walls and shiny tiled floor at Sister's new gallery (formerly belonging to Peres Projects). Through chance operations, Williams made magic lanterns out of kinetic sculpture, activating his objects and the space.
John Altoon at The Box
This stunning selection of John Altoon's drawings, made between 1962 and 1968, represents a kind of Id of mid-century American marketing. In a group of scenarios disguised as print advertisements, the pleasure principal takes over revealing the repressed or unspoken desires of popular culture--a topless woman makes advances on a telephone repair man, a nude woman is crucified while a couple discusses their toothpaste. These drawings, which depart greatly from the late artist's well-known body of abstract paintings, should be housed in a museum as an important example of Altoon's deeply complex psychology and artistic ability.
Cynthia Maughan at 2nd Cannons Gallery
In January of 2008, artist Matthew Chambers' notorious closet-size gallery in Chinatown, Trudi, was handed off to artist Brian Kennon to establish an exhibition space for his experimental press, 2nd Cannons Publications. The claustrophobic space seemed tailor made for the onslaught of drawings and collages by Cynthia Maughan that was exhibited there this fall. Maughan is a native Angeleno who shares with Kennon a love of black humor and the darker sides of "normality." Her exhibition, Wreckage: 1976-2008, revealed the artist's sharp and sometimes cynical sensibility as it has developed over the past thirty years. Sadly, Maughan's brilliant but little-known video art from the 1970s was absent from this show, but with the rediscovery of her works on paper, I'm confident we'll see more from the artist before 2009 is over.
Bonus show:
California Video at the J. Paul Getty Museum
I'm not sure it would be journalistically ethical to include this exhibition in my "official" top ten given that I assisted curator Glenn Phillips in the organization of this amazing show. Nevertheless, I strongly feel that no "best-of 2008" list would be complete without 'California Video' ranking somewhere close to the top. Even having a small hand in its creation, I am still surprised and amazed by this exceptional survey of the abundance of video art that has emerged from the golden state over the past forty years. This exhibition, which merely scratched the surface of an incredibly diverse and important history of the medium, made way for more shows of and publications on these often under-recognized works.
Catherine Taft is a Los Angeles-based writer and critic. Her writing on contemporary art and culture has appeared in magazines including Modern Painters, Art Review, Artforum.com, and Metropolis M and in various museum catalogs. Her recent projects include curating a series of video and film screenings throughout LA, and research and curatorial assistance for the Getty Museum's exhibition, 'California Video' (March 2008).
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