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ICE CUBE CELEBRATES THE EAMES CELEBRATE THE ERA THAT CONTtNUES TO tNSPtRE THE WORLD: ART IN L.A. 1945-1980

OCT 2011 TO APR 2012 * • p,citaund=rd,im.,o,8 * ' r "

TIME

"W^^ ^ ^ T

Ice Cube Celebrates the Eames, poster, 2011, (artwork ©J. Paul Getty Trust)

Malik Gaines

City after Fifty Years* Living: L.A.'s Differences in Relation

It s not about the piece but about how the pieces fit together It's about taking something that airead)/

exists, and making something special,

ice Cube

A marketing triumph. Pacific Standard Time has been responsible for a series of pro-

rnotional videos, slickly produced, that pair an honored artist with a Southern

California celebrity. The shining success among these original

works is the pairing of the late design team Ray and Charles

Eames with the rapper and actor Ice Cube. The promo per-

formatively enacts both the mainstream ambitions and the

eccentric interests that play out in the larger scope of the

Pacific Standard Time project. Important here, as in other loca-

tions throughout PST that will be explored in this essay, a

politicized racial subjectivity signifies a kind of vanguardism that, in this time and

place, can finally be aligned with avant-gardist art strategies. Featured prominently

on the Getty Museum's website, accompanied by Ice Cube posters on bus stops

around Los Angeles, this promo is a touch more surprising than the museum's

de rigueur videos with John Baldassari and Ed Ruscha. The Eameses come off as

Ice Cube's California kindred spirits: like the rapper, they invented their own art

forms and unique career paths. "Coming from South Central Los Angeles, you've

got to use what you've got and make the best of it. What I love about the Eameses

is how resourceful they are." ' Shot in the gritty realness of black and white, the

promo first features Ice Cube giving a tour of quirky L.A. architectural landmarks

from the driver's seat of his convertible. "405 traffic: that's bourgie traffic, n o

traffic: that's gangsta traffic.There's a difference." Maintaining his attention to

difference, the performer finally arrives at the famous Eames Case Study home,

the star of the couple's films such as House after Five Years' Living ( 19^5"). Neither black

nor poor, the Eames world was a long way from South Central. Nevertheless Ice

Cube continues to draw parallels: "Before I did rap music, I studied architectural

drafting. One thing I learned was, you've always gotta have a plan." He compares

the Eameses' resourceful combinations of postwar prefabricated elements with the

practice of sampling in hip-hop. Noting the house's sensitive relationship to the

land on which it's situated, he declares to the camera: "This is going green 1949

style, bitch. Believe that."

What does that mean. Ice Cube? A contemporary environmentalist slogan is

set into an historic time which the Eameses were so obviously ahead of The per-

former uses his celebrity authority and his hip-hop credibility to affirm the verac-;

ity of this distant fact. But who is the bitch? Me? The Getty? AU of us? Is that a

term of endearment or a sign of hostility? Are there misogynist or homophobic

i

I I'tniion Tiirirt or n i K s i ' l i l i irl v«. lit'rt* P; 1. From the 2011 video Ice Cube Celebrates the Eames. During Pacific Standard Time, the video could be seen at the PS7 website. It is now (May 9, 2012) available at www.youtube.com/watch?v= FRWatw_ZEQI and several other websites. The

! ! video is also the source of the epigraph for this 1,11 essay Further quotations in this paragraph are I , from the same video.

c o n l c x l Hum 1 lie artisl-made abstract wall-works in New York, wliiiii itl their geometric neutralily fade into a welter of Itudcmarks anil ads. The work of lhe I. A. I ine Ail SIIUIHI, (in the o l h e r luind. breaking

sm. tie-

Dewain Valentine: Untitled (Curved Slab). 1970, po connotations? Why not just call us "niggas"? That would be too much, a trans-

gression too far, and perhaps a less appropriate description of this audience. But

have we come so far around that it's not too much for a onetime gangsta rapper

. former avowed enemy of the LAPD, working on behalf of a conservative

institution and under corporate advertising direction, to call the museum public . j,,j^^ ^̂ j-

i.̂ a bitch to its face? Is this postmodern multiplicity, under which minority dialects iiinienl

Sqiare brought into equivalence with standard speech, where black coUoquial talk is

validated as one of many permissible languages that communicates with a decen- . ( 1 1 , H * 1 ^ l I l C

^̂ tralized apparatus? Or is this that postmodern assimilative force that renders aU rrently embarked on a "direcl-mail eonceptiial novel" whose novelistic import was not evident with the first mailing of "100 Boots l-acing I h e S e u . " I M U w h o s e i i : i r r ; i l i v e p r o p e r t i e s d e v e l o p e d « i l h " 1 0 0 B o o t s

Seymour Rosen, Asco's Stations of the Cross, speech, all difference, all performativity meaningless under the auspices of spec- 1971, gelatin silver print (pnnted 2011)̂ 18 x 24 in. ^ ^ ^ ^ j ^ ^ . don^jn^nce? Does this practice of equivalence, a deeply democratic notion, (45.7 X 61 cm) (photograph © SPACES—Saving ^ -i ' c 1 and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments) Strengthen different voices, or finally order them into a more manageable and

compliant public sphere? Asco, detail of Decoy Gang War Victim, 1974, color photograph, 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm) Like the region s oft-cited assemblage tradition pioneered by artists like Betye (artwork © Asco: photograph © Harry Gamboa, Saar on one hand and Edward Kienholz on the other. Pacific Standard Time draws Jr., provided by the photographer) ,

attention to differences in relation. It s about how the pieces fit together. Ice Cube

and the Eameses represent the dramatic restructuring set in motion by Pacific

Standard Time, an initiative involving practicaUy every art institution in the region.

PST's intention, laid out in the catalogue of the Getty Museum's own exhibition,

has been to reorient a history of American modernist art practices to reflect those

innovations developed in Los Angeles. This primary purpose proposes a modest

change to the standard Europe-to-New-York history, but that proposition has

mobilized a proliferation of alternate histories, many of which refiect political

motivations far more radical than die Getty's own. Throughout Southern California,

numerous PST exhibitions have featured formerly marginalized subjects, formerly

marginalized mediums, or both, stretching modernist art premises in ways the

Getty might not have initially imagined. As in the promotional video that pairs an

idiosyncratic design collective with an innovator of West Coast hip-hop, the mar-

gins of the mainstream have come into specific focus through PST, and are build-

ing contextual relationships that distort the constructions of form, value, artistic

practice, and aesthetic experience that have dominated modernist art ideologies.

^, ^ PST's different history has become a history of differences. While the Getty

^ ^Museum's own exhibition lays out objects associated with local finish-fetish trends

other refined formal projects of the post-mid-century, the city's largest con-

^temporary art exhibitors have been a touch more daring. The Hammer Museum

has presented a scholarly attempt to set a record straight in Now Dig This! Black Art in |

Los Angeles, i960—1980, organized by the art historian Kellie Jones. At the Museum of

Contemporary Art (MOCA), in addition to an already existing installation of films

by Kenneth Anger, a queer icon, and a show of Hollywood photographs by Weegee,

both of which exceed the fine-art category altogether, an extensive review of local

contemporary artists has been presented in the curator Paul Schimmei's Under the

Big Black Stin: California Art 1974-1981, which jumbles together conceptualist, feminist,

performance, and Pop art, as weU as craft, political printmaking, murals, punk

music, and photography practices, along with a handful of paintings, into a

mélange of compelling and rewarding singular works. The Los Angeles County

Museum of Art (LACMA) presented a design show, which included the Eameses,

but also two exhibitions with dense minoritarian vibrations: a retrospective of the

performance coUective Asco, and a long-hidden, room-size Kienholz instaUation,

Five Car Stud ( 1969-72), that depicts the lynching of a black man.

Of course, these would be unlikely institutional occurrences during the years

in question. One of the finest PST shows was Asco: Elite of the Obscure, 1972-1987, a

survey of the group's work organized by C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez,

lough the coUective's members were engaged in visual art through other means

; well, their coUaborative work made in the 1970s was action-based, politically

critical, and formaUy transgressive, helping to innovate a kind of performance art

at has since endured. Within the group's theatrical, cinematic oeuvre, one reso-

nant image is Spray Paint LACMA (East Bridge) ( 1972), a photograph of Patssi Valdez

90

Seymour Locks, "Biue Chenille," mixed media, 5'

' John Milton. Milton offered epic faith and humanity but, îcts, Blake was attracted to

of drama anyl larpp cp^^tiirp Although ra| e's tinted dr. ;heir simpli' tality. ist's small the Frene

s. He saw t religiously

ie immini — anotho

t detested tii S president, 'Dutch-Engli e church IS, for, alth| antheist him: 2ment and )elief to hav it.

tist's individi ït, in sighif : of both hi| îlake lived ihe past. , irder: Orient sanee, pure eologists ar story. Lord il indignatio national treasures, the narbles of the Parthenon. I predicated /isual source: I friezes, )t illuminati copied and 0, Durer, and draftsman, J I Blake amo friends and

-ifluence. Th ly all be fa nal artists

imaginative sted betweeni it is not eve >. At any rat personal if portraits a at Huntin

James Barry mer. There

illustrators . Burney an am Locke. Blake's dry of English

ng of Blak more impon

(Ctioh with t ciating idea

Blake joins on. The Pre f/n time, Fra'

art compounds its sources lems whose flowing line and allegorical figures exalt the

divinity of human imagination. If the flesh of this art must dwell in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its

Recent works are of three picto- rial types: he continues the person- glimpsed-in-a-car, a familiar Gill trade-

LARRY RIVERS, Dwan Gallery: format show, arranged from fr^ of earlier interests plus seven ,~iit-niit hoxPï. dating from 19(

••>—ig look at little !• ** running imf>ro'

art scene. "Th i .ne Sunday Sere

OHS .,^ i*jks from 1963 op " «jilt up into tht

wide sli ed paint, are I s of everyday ai

sex and spi ch in these t . mostly verbal, sents a kind oi

.h echoes the "Parts of the

, the artist pa a reproduction known female

ig anatomical ( rsents how op to how many can take and i

riginal concept Tindensing and ige has resulte cisive paint ie llage "Dutch

problem „ i v-uii.b.[iin¿ liit.rjt„.'c >".¡th a formal, non-allusive imagery, these

ips quietly from t,'"ie .'OG,TI. The girl casts a sphinx-like shadow and stares

jupy passages, MIS color—where uses it—is much improved and more somber. The raucous extroversion of an earlier red-foil background is gone.

prints included with this small collec- tion of sculptures shouldn't have been.

CO.

A ^ ^ ^ in "diagram: real or mock plans for future projects. It doesn't really matter

igram has assur an shift in or

o a painted of [h no loss of rel orks in the sh unted on box object, a Webst little larger th

' o u t s are mosti s, with the CL flower mountet •1 a Pop-Cubist :-i-iing." The flow«

mostly very t enging is the c and Cigars." It t Rivers impro solid material

his case, is tt ¡be "played." T

visual and ver ake place ins object itself,

lindrical conte: and inactive ur taking place a

format" deman( • the view of i evolves to me¡ of the artist'

EBRUN, Silvan Simone This large viewing of Lebrun drawings is held together promise that it comprises worl

by DeLuca

Double-twisted flat rope bordered $5. Indian Gold Piece cuff links $140.00 (Also available with $5.00 Liberty Gold Piece with fine-twisted border $125.00)

Two love birds of 14 K gold ' sculpture with blue pearls $50.00

Modern sculptured men's ring with V* ct. diamond. 14 K oxidized gold $250.00

, Three pearls set in modern cage of ' gold, diamonds & sapphires $178.00

$5. Liberty Gold- Piece, set flush, neat Florentined money clip $80.00

2. See Chon A. Noriega, "Conceptual Graffiti and

the Public Art Museum: Spray Paint LACMA." in

Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972-

1987. exh. cat. (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz. |

2011). 260.

3. Artforum, October 2011. cover.

4267 Crenshaw Boulevard Los Angeles, California 90008

AX. 2-9144

HIPPIES amtimu'd

see that. They're permissive. They're posed against the museum building, situated above graffiti inscribed by Harry I Gamboa, Jr., Gronk, and Willie Herrón. While she emphasizes the text with her | body, Valdez also disregards it, glancing instead over her shoulder, perhaps ner- vously. The group had tagged the LACMA building the night before, performing its exclusion from the institution by suggesting that that would be the only way the Chicano, semi-queer collective would be able to show art there. Valdez suffered her own exclusion, prohibited by her male collaborators from joining them on their graffiti mission the night before,̂ Instead, Valdez's photographed body personi- fies the racial, gender, and political differences that played out against the body of the museum in this action, a museum that had a poor history of showing women artists, people of color, or performance art, even. Now, with a carefully curated | exliibition, a gloriously thorough 432-page catalogue, and demonstrations of pub- lic appreciation that extended to the cover of the New York—based Artforum maga- zine. Asco has been reoriented.' The Asco exhibition, which transforms provisional performances, videos, and ephemera into a legible museum display, reasserts the question that hngers around so many of these projects: is this a radicalization of the institution or an institutionalization of the radical? The answer to this question, here and elsewhere, is yes, both. That this question has more than one answer is already a signal that the singular force of the institution can be unset- tled by ambivalent production. While such institutionalization softens the rough 1 edges of marginal practices, it also deconsolidates the centralizing power that the | institution promotes. While this back-and-forth may limit radical possibilities, j it also activates the critical potential in works and practices that agitate against institutional structures. While the LACMA exliibition partially serves as a self- exonerating corrective to the exclusions invoked in the spray-paint act, it also consecrates a critical acknowledgment of that exclusion, installing a recognition of racist histories into the official discourse. The enterprise proves less radical Ithan the group's original street actions, more liberal than the exclusionary history of the institution. In a kind of dialectical synthesis, art history undergoes progress.

Even Five Car Stud, made by a prominent Los Angeles artist but not seen in .A. at the time it was made, has shifted with the historical situation. Though

¡Kienholz's largest undertaking to that point, it was shown only at Documenta 5- and a few other German venues. Until recently, it has been in storage in Japan, sequestered because the elaborate installation is difficult to transport and mount, but also because of its confrontational subject matter. It had never been on view in the United States before this LACMA exhibition. The work consists of five old cars arranged in a circle in a dark room, their headlights illuminating a central scene of grotesque white men, realistically scaled but made of plaster and rubber, who are gathered around a somewhat abstracted black man who lies on the ground. As a couple of the figures hold the black man down, another is posed to slice off his penis with a knife. The black man's torso is a small pool of fluid in which the letters N, I, G, G, E, and R float around with kinetic possibility. While the scene itself is disturbing, among the most eerie aspects of the experience are seeing one's own footprints along with those of all of the other gallery visitors that are registered in the sand covering the floor, leaving traces of everyone who has visited and thus participated in the scene, and creating an overlap between this flurry of activity and that. Another uncanny phenomenon results from the way that viewers gather aroxmd the space and look in toward the lynching, repli-

Hippies." Eliot is fond of intoning ;u ihc beginning of each sentence, and then goes on to toll ofT their "wants," their "needs." ( His pompousness is trying at best, and

ling

NT

finest ~he¡s, ohere V the

iod, yet no further docu- in some cases even dates,

:his random selection of 3e viewed as a "formative" 1 artist who was later to ficant Influence on a cer- ion of California artists, ity of groupings around rests, projects, or subjec- s" is perhaps hampered re of the artist's life at j t this should not be an lie task for any real par- .ebrun ethic.

tion presents some fifty ing from the period 1930- d which encompasses Le- 1 to Italy and work at living in New York and a ssion, and finally his def- to California in 1938. The Tiage shifted his early in- ikills in stained glass to ties of mural and fresco, ftly modeled "Mirror Carry- One," dated 1934, as well with Lantern" of 1936, re- ll-scale studies for mural

one of which was exe- he New York City Post g this period. The small wing fragment "Invention ' seems to be of a later cally linear way of ap- public mural style.

The surprises of this exhibition are the small pen and ink drawings, some of which measure only a few inches

questions can at least be seen. I.S.P.

STANLEY LANDSMAN, Feigen/Palmer

and spoons. Eventually one begins to piece ou tinctive varieties of styles. There !

••h of the h ÎS and kings gnity of an ; Ivory Coast

the only Af objects for

—a cult fig jntrast the f the Baule s of polychr uli figure gl

across. In these very eating the positions and the gazes of the grotesque cast figures who watch from ramblings, such as t h e , . , ._ . , , , ^ ures holding candles ¡n'̂ "^ periphery. For a moment, m one s own peripheral vision, one can confuse miniature mad processthe presence of a museum visitor who is standing still with the presence of one quite distinct from whaof the sculpted culprits. The immersive environment, the theatrical lighting, the Lebrun asserts itself, a s . ,, , , , , , r- of scale and its accomp'̂ "'̂ ^ '"'̂ '-"̂ ^ '^*'^'"°^^ narrative suggestions, and the sense that these figures are lays certain concerns posed mid-action—all enact a political drama that compels viewers to engage naked to the bone. For Vwith the discursive terms of racial spectacle. The opposite of minimalist. Five Car diltjtes the Expressioni; , .c i i • .n c iMr I Id L ^JI d 11 f O II ILJ III Idp^^I y

tic power, are two conchistory of American racism.

sinuate and underpin tl Made during the years when Black Power had overcome Civil Rights, when work, their iuxtapositioi , . , . . . i i , i i i . r i sense, a un ensemble" combining "^^^^^ " ° ' ^ ^^ prominent assassinations had rephrased the history of spectacular ^g^g^ ĵ y j ^ , powerful intentions. Thviolence against African Americans, Kienholz's piece was perhaps too hot for jres and opr essentially "unfree" lineAmerican institutions and audiences of its own time. LACMA itself had experi- black-white

.. , TU enced a controversy with the artist's Back Seat Dodae'̂ 8 (1964), "which produced a » , , , as those forms. The secc ' a J v ^ T / . r j.g totemlike ious adherence to an ovePublic outcry on the grounds of its sexual representation (it was called "revolting, the Bis of D principle that rushes tpornographic and blasphemous" by the powerful supervisory board that oversaw, stands atop tional pictorial solutioni^^^ ^^^^^ things, the the museum itself)."* One can speculate that Five Cor Stud the havoc and horror c ° ° i f Lebrun took upon h i mse^o^<i have caused a stir as well in Los Angeles, at a time when Black Panthers and re coloration a formal mode that wouthe LAPD were engaged in a televised street war. While evoking the racial tensions nally over tv. uciiL i.^c^ î ii .,u . OÍ its time, the piece in its latest form also asks viewers to meditate on what S "

The problems this raisec ndition nece; the standpoint of his (Changed since then. As the scholar Leigh Raiford "writes in the exhibition brochure: ,|.,j.y presumgeneration, leave many answered. He should be coherent presentation Coast by his supporter;

. See Holly Myers, "Confronting the Darkness if Ed Kienholz's 'Five Car Stud' at LACMA," Los ige/es Times, August 28. 2011.

. Leigh Raiford. "Edv /̂ard Kienholz: Five Car Stud 969/2011," in Edward Kienholz: Five Car Stud, '969-1972, Revisited, exhibition brochure (LACMA, 011).

. See Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The ß/rth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Alien Lane, 1977). - Myers.

' •/>•• • "'W

Edward Kienholz's Five Car Stud (1969-1972) remains as powerful and

disturbing, overwhelming and irritating, as it was when it first appeared in

Germany. . . . In this interregnum, history continued to move, challenging

and correcting the violent wrongs depicted in this piece. Whue Five Car Stud

slept in its crates, we have witnessed the end of Jim Crow segregation and

the extension of democracy to all US citizens, and we have celebrated the end

of Apartheid in South Africa and the election of a mixed-race black man as

president of the US. Yet in the same decades we have built the largest system

of mass incarceration in history—with 2.3 million Americans behind bars,

the majority of them black or brown (far more men of color than attend col-

lege)—and witnessed the rise of a race-baiting poHtical party that questions

Obama's legitimacy as an American. Five Car Stud in its return to its country of

origin at once transports us back to a time of unambiguous violence, hatred,

and racial divisions, "while alerting us to our O"wn current crises.^

I In introducing the work, Raiford begins by contextualizing the difference

between then and now. Interestingly, the shift from lynching to prison seems to

mirror an epistemological shift Michel Foucault outlined in European history,

from punishment on the scaffold to the invisible institutional correction per-

fected in the panopticon. Important in Foucault's Discipline and Punish is the idea

that power transfori"ns rather than abates.' While the lynching itself feels anachro-

nistic, the problem of racial antagonism does not. Five Car Stud, in its current itera-

tion, at once tells a story of progress and of the enduring institutional structures

around which this progress maneuvers. The Los Angeles Times critic Holly Myers

introduced the return of the work with careftil uncertainty: "How it will be

received today—^whether as a historical document of the civil rights era or as lens a

to turn on the darkest tendencies of our O"wn time—remains to be seen."''

tribal import; I. Among the used only 0 guide the sp

Mannequin," 2By,x22". (Silvan Simone Gallery.) 93 artjournal

Stanley Landsman, "Three Graces," liquitex, 90x67)4", 1965. (Feigen/ Palmer Gallery.)

Fetish Figure. Congo, 13" high. (Harr

Despite its explicit representation, we can now read the piece in multiple ways.

The space between then and now is opened up in this dark room, unfolding in

more than one direction, animated by ambivalent potential.

Five Car Stud, along with the gaUery full of historicizing (apologizing?) waU

texts that one passes on the way into the exhibition, reflects shifts in the dis-

course around difference that have taken place over these past decades. While

representation is one problem raised in this discourse, participation has been

another, as the Asco show demonstrates. The first African American artist to have

a solo show at LACMA was Maren Hassinger, in 1981, a fact that helps point to the-

xclusions that characterize the pre-1980 period of PST.' Ln an inversion ofthat

egativity, the Hammer Museum's Now Dig This! uses the PST structure to transform

set of historically marginalized artists into a major museum presence. Artists

like Hassinger, who was commissioned by the Hammer to reconstruct a few

. „ , , , . , . . ^ .,„.,., c .̂xarge-scale wire sculptures, appear here, deservedly, in the corrective embrace of Guy Dill: Untitled wood and rope sculpture, 1971. Eaci- * f • ft- • /• through which rope passes is in a separate block of wc^useum consecration. An important scholarly inscription in the art-historical pressure holds the "beam" together. Irving Blum Gallerecord, the exhibition and catalogue connect a few weU-known figures (Saar,

John Outterbridge, David Hammons) to an incredibly dynamic and productive art scene that at the time was "lacking representation in mainstream institutions," as Jones describes it.'While most of the artists participated with official art culture on some level, through art schools or professional careers, most also worked beyond mainstream institutions and invented their own ways of showing art that

the weakest part of the Los Angeles mix at preseiiL^^^j^ ^sonate with their African American experiences. Presented here in a ^ ' " ! interesting things ahout Los Angeles is the wa\ . . ^ i . . 1 j . 1 .i.. . 1 . . j . 1 ^

, . . , , . , • . J i 1 series 01 thematic groupings, the erudite exhibition reveals practices m dialogue , oei seemingly rather isolated artists proceed to work 111 B f &• t" 5 ) gci ways, minus the supporting appendages one has giand coUaboration, originating in self-run galleries and aided by communitarian even

New Yorkers tend to think that art miglit just ^friendships, demonstrating the best of the L.A. art spirit. ^'•^^ museums, galleries, magazines-and, of course, Iht Qne of these friendships was made evident in the opening weekend's perfor-','^^" Angeles artists seem to exist in their own ambien 1 TT • TTI T 1 • j r I.T J T, • • 1 ' ° " '

„ , , , . , uu M u 1.. .manee by Hassmger, Ulysses Jenkins, and Senga Nengudi. Reviving some elements unaffected by the varying health or ill-health ot ' 6 > / J • as s framework. (Art in Los Angeles did not collapse evetpf previous performance projects such as Ceremony for Freeway Fets ( 1978), which was faet magazine-a catalyst while there-moved to New Yidesigned by Nengudi using her signature pantyhose constructions and first per-

The woes of the area's museums are well known ; formed under an L.A. freeway overpass by Nengudi, Hassinger, Jenkins, Hammons, Museum (rich) and the Pasadena Museum (desperate 1 1 1 . . i. x. r 1 • l- • 1

^ , , , , . . , . , , and others, this reunion appearance brought some of the ritualistic elements housed ui relatively new, world s-tair-flashy yet quas ^'^ *= proceed to show (mostly Pasadena) or not to .show (devised in those early performances into a multipurpose space inside the museum. ^ County) Los Angeles art. The overhead for both theThe writer Nick Stillman describes Nengudi's recoUection of the former public plants seems to have been something of a kiss o site: "Nengudi says she was drawn to that unexceptional patch of public land activities with local art. Their architectural turpitud^^^^^^^ ^-^^ ^^^^^^ ^^^^^^ j . ^ - ^ persisting there—tiny palms and shrubs amid oppressive too. Pasadena has developed a speciali function, and manages to give regular attention to the dirt—'had the sense of Africa. '"While the Hammers annex certainly does and out of the area. The L.A. County Museum, at Knot offer a sense of Africa, the three artists reconvened there wearing pantyhose enthusiasm for modern art, often hamstrung by colhfetishes on dieir heads and bodies, and arranged within a space deUneated by professional staff and trustees, opened its new buildij^^^^ .̂ ^ ^ constructions, as a large audience of museum visitors gathered. In paniment of a traumatic series of engagements wit during the protracted gestation period for its recent^his simple act, a kind of convocation, the diree artists distributed candles under nology" exhibition (see pp. 22-26) its work wilh knaprojected starlight, kissed the cheeks of audience members, and offered the instruc- ceased. However its recent group show. "24 Yuution that people should hug themselves, whUe they gently sang "This Little Light of Artists,8. See Kellie Jones, introduction to Now Dig Th/s/; n i n u . , , . „ „ , 1 1 . , . . _ , . , . , r- , 1 artists ^rt and Black Los Angeles ,960-1980, ed. Jones, r.-eiMine. Soon the w h o l e r o o m was quieüy smgmg. This m o d e s t ritual, p e r f o r m e d by

breath t^^^- '^^^- ('̂ ""''̂ h, London. New York: Prestel. (2Jj,,.artists w h o are over sixty, signaled a k i n d of c a l m v i n d i c a t i o n . Despite t h e c a m p i -

More^°J^.'•^• '̂ any n e s s of Sengudi's r e m a r k a b l e c o s t u m e s , a n d t h e slight siUiness of seeing t h e m o n

promol^ij Nick Stillman. "Senga Nengudi's Ceremony for '^''' s u c h m a t u r e artists, the s h o r t p e r f o r m a n c e r e s o n a t e d w i t h a s i n c e r e positivity. T h e museurp^eewoy Fets and Other Los Angeles Collabora- ^"'^'-•radicaUy inventive, p r o v i s i o n a l e n e r g y of Freeway Fets h a d dissipated; the m u s e u m o w n s S(tions, East of Borneo, December/, 2011. online ate arl ' '^ &/ / r old mawvvw.eastofborneo.org/. i. jhspace, however, provided a sense that with art-historical hindsight, artists whose great public collections (excluding the specialized and hard-lo-liiul Huntington Gallery in San Marino), whatever the futuro potenlial from Messrs. Getty, Simon and Hammer may be(see^?p. ̂ Ö-W.̂ )̂ "'̂Basically, Los Angeles dealers are not very engaged with Los

) paintings Taise so many un- side issues about the role of in a work of art, the possi

Maren Hassinger, Ulysses Jenkins, and le ot S"i^Senga Nengudi, KISS, 2O11, Hammer Museum, subject ii|_Q5 Angeles, 2012 (artwork © Maren Hassinger,

arary painyiyjjgjjgpi^jp^^ ^^¿ Senga Nengudi: photograph pnnectionsby Alan Kimara Dixon) ¡visual, that one is almost ca- lo forgiving him for the vast f his individual artistic inco- . He assumes no such good ver, on the part of the viewer,

ead slyly makes the proleptic iment, in the course of a ques- answer sequence in the cata-

lis present show (twenty-five fifteen prints and collages)

Jeed, he wants his work to beit heroically, rather than to the "two-bit successes of an 1 has become marginal." On ce, such a desire might seem of the Abstract Expressionist

e on "impurity" or a Rauschen eint at " l i f e . " Kitaj's esthetic

closer in spirit, however, to ng humanism, modified, na- py the 20th-century stock in

that have transformed the Jbject into heroism manqué Brand manner into symbolic in-

In practice he attempts to I (or at least to refer to) sub- bt are normally approached verbal means: the quality of the relevance of iconographie to art history, the mood of

! induced anxieties, the revolu- personality, artist heroes as ate chimeras, the persistence Ity of childhood experiences, ical lost (leftish) causes of listory. HIS implied humanistic

is that painting can deal as ly with the important psycho- noral, and historical topics of as literature. Ironically, Kitaj's

rginal" subjects emerge as the a series of verbal allusions her on the canvas or print it- the mock-erudite assortment graphic references, quotations, sonal explanations which er footnote his paintings in the logs accompanying his earlier 1963 in London and February /ear in New York), in the ex-

materials he exhibited with works in these earlier shows,

le literary titles he gives. A ; of these verbal appendages ield references to articles in nal of the Warburg and Cour- stitutes, biographies of rovo ÎS, Edwarm. Ulysses Jenkins in conversation with the author,ust ourne, poĵ rî iary 2012, Los Angeles, if the Spanisl) Civil War, Isaac îxperiences as a cossack, Mah Tiphonies, a Partisan Review n Nietzsche, and to assorted

writings of I. A. Richards, Jonathan Williams, Fritz SaxI. Charles Olson, Georges Sorel, Georg Trjkl, Mano Praz,

Fo

to snipe away—severing the central rhythms with boxed off areas, destroy- ing surface tension with a surprising

Riviere" all jeer at artistic while arrogating the charms past. Other paintings satirize

s mystical hero iques to make " t h nd flags. Simulté

ze on the free drawing problems

parts of a fema |igure of poetry, r. This literary pi of sleight-of-har distract us from t d figure, supply ass intellectualisi the toughness of

Rivers' art? Thi s have been pi

refer to a range 0 and styles (Indian Alphonse Legros, tisse, Frank Stella) sonal experiences ( to historic events illustration plates)¡ after one has fo path through all alia, the spice of in what he does astonishing fact of attempting

The current snovt^^^H^^^^^^^^HpMMHp^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Hconoclasm requii emphasizes—quite | H | ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ » ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ 9 ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ B i a n gracious subs

less interestingly—||ESi|^H||^|H|^BtiH^^^^^^^^Hiilíliil^^^^^^^^B''—unless denial ( The unusual catalog appaiatus ol Onve suntiounteü severe limitations— values violates one's own temp Kitaj's previous shows is eliminated Courbet. Manet, Gauguin. Rivers' early —then one gets tough in (although Maurice-work once thrived i n marginal contexts might eventually be acknowledged on an is job. s u g g e s t i v e i n t r o d u c r c - i i i T , • . r 1 . i i . . 1 1 n

. , , ,o]iiciai level. Returning to tactics irom their youth, these artists reminded us that porates some of tl ' formation into fthirty-plus years later. Now Dig This! marks a kind of institutional debut. Kitaj's subjects). The exhibition radiates with the warmth of this and other reunions, but the most of their at there are still the t on the works ther^i^'^i'^S '̂ '̂ ^ works of Hassinger, Nengudi, and Jenkins, one can imagine various ings are no less [chapters of art history in which they should have been included all along. Nengudi'srs' technical posed, in the best^j-j^jj^j^j ĝ ^̂ j ^ ^ j . ^ ^ ^ ^ j ^ ^ ̂ ^j ^̂ ^ j^^^g ^̂ ^̂ ^ ^^^^j .̂̂ ^^ ]̂ g |.]^ j^j. Q£-^^ ^̂ ^̂ ;. He pulls d tradition, of decip o r / 0 ^ ^ ^ ^^ progn

non-decipherable re^"'^'^^'^ American art context, but also should have always shared galleries with ĵ g ^3,^5 ̂ ^ the paintings are Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Eva Hesse, Lynda Benglis, and other well-known .tinguishable 1 by the fact that thj^jjjjfg .^]^Q jjĵ yg (,]^^gj-^ggçj j^jj^jj^jjgj pj.gj^ggg .^jjj^ j,j.ĵ £î ^̂ l^ji^j^^ there is no

travagant motley of . , , . . ^ ,. 1 1 , - , » r - A ="«S. Its w ing commitment tc^assinger s ambitious formalism only obliquely suggests an African American ivertisements. mal principle. Harcontext; the works included in Now Dig This! make industrial-material references is most app) form, semi-abstractfjjjf suggest human bondage but also modernity more generally. Jenkins's presen- ^"^^ when Ri tive motifs fringe th . , , , , , , , , , ^ :s of Delacroi: monsters spatial d^ '̂'̂ '̂̂ ' ^ show, occupying three video monitors that play lengthy loops of at flat stylizationsoriginal video, is among the most revelatory—with the only video on view; Grosz, Matisse borcjejjjins seems to have been alone among his peers in working with that new and the spirit of Bi j , . r , . ,, ., , , , Ch' apo iu Ble ho ' ^ ^ ' i ' ^ ' ^ ' ^ ^^'-^ '^^ partially attributes to his atypical access to university editing images, made andfacihties." A few videos made with black-and-white Sony Portapak video teehnol- for great dei rated, mutilated, dogy document the art and music scene of the 1970s, including stirring portraits 'rnantic awe i •" ' "̂ a repertoi r ,

01 other artists

is predicated on the negativity that had marked previous exclusions.^ 6 / f

' with romar tire has a sh- ind only fun. ture". If thei / to reduce g there is apoi

irette packs, " ^'^ü War > pickaninnies

. . . °_'of other artists in the show (In the Spirit of Charles White, 1970, and King David, 1978).

distraught linear d e ^ n o t h e r group of works shot on an early color camcorder, such as Inconsequential

often dispensable EDoggereal (198t) and Without Your Interpretation (1983), transition into rather experi- explicable scribbles, 1 r- , . . , . 1 , ^ to be a Dut ,,, . . . mental torms, employing trippy montages, theatrical narratives, combinations of »L. like borders, criss r / & r r / 5 • • up is the pui

ome poignar Jttons in "Sa\ :s comedian /nicism, under

The color, jazzy, st'^PPropriation and original text and image, and Jenkins's own free-jazz musical

ant, is perhaps tlperformances, all of which present a kind of black criticality toward estabhshed

° s

ivers' picture his least d<

d. His mothc ven the slati ie—he finds i

the trapi

a melancholic sense that they should have been available to die mainstream ]

-,(-e, art audience all along. Definition of Nobody" or "The Perils transforming silk purses into of Revisionism"). Even when he uses ears. The justly-famous "Dutch a central, potenticWy ^WíWSpl image.

. . . ^ ,, ,_ social conditions. Now Dia This! recovers these materials, along with amazing pieces incidentally, enhan " - a & f stallation), but it, by predecessors Saar, Outterbridge, Charles White, Melvin Edwards, Alonzo and guerrilla war on ordDale Davis, and others, providing a platform for their current consumption, rates his images

V v i i i v i i i v i ^ i i i ï ~ i f i i i i i i i j i i i > t ~ i i > i ~ 1 1 I 1 - 1 1 i i i T ~ \ / ^ L i i i L P i i i i i f ^ v r ' i i r ^ r ^ L i ^ I / ^ I I ^ I M I - ' i i i 1 1 L I - ' i i i ^ i i i s . i r t - ' ^ i i i

tough ock.

sows Rivers is the last of the ears. The justly-famous "Dutch Mas graphers. His transformation ters," "The Greatest Homosexual,"

Brookl;

as in "An Early Europe," he proceeds and the incredibly flaccid "Mile. concept of the artist-as-hero i of the hero-as-clown parallels

DBERT RAUSC

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iBetye Saar, Black Girl's Window, 1969, assem |blage in window, 35̂ 4 x 18 x 1 / Î in. (90.8 x 45.7 x 3.8 cm). Collection the artist (artworl< © Betye

ISaar; photograph provided by Michael Rosenfeld JGallery. LLC. New York)

[lohn Outterbridge, No Time forjivin', from Containment Series, 1969, mixed media. 56 x 60

Iin. (142.2 X 152.4 cm). Mills College Art Museum. Ipurchased with funds from the Susan L. Mills Fund »artwork©John Outterbridge)

draws ^Rlebati ^ ^ s o c i a l

Like Xon- Dig This' man) nt lhe current exhibitions illustrate apparently posi- ive differences between now and then. Fascinatingly, PST's historicizing structure

draws critical attention to the elided period, 1981—2010, -when transformative .ebates around the politics of representation accompanied a reformation of the

sphere to acknowledge the interests of women, people of color, queers, and] thers. Identity politics influenced the art milieu. More broadly, a cultural assimi- ation of a diversity-tolerant form of liberal pluralism made different kinds of presentations possible within powerful institutions during these years. Much

emains unsaid in PST literature about the ways a second history prepared this revious history for the present. In today's Los Angeles, when formerly marginal-

i i u i i r c i t h l l ^ m a k i n g a o o n i m i ' r c i a l g a l l e r y a f i - a s i b U < V f U t u r i - f o r

a y o u n g e r , r i i i - r g r t i c w n u l i l - b r i l i - a l i - r , \ ' i l a l t o i h r i n i l r p i - n r l i - m r o f i h . '

g r o w i n g g r o u p «i( n> » . n i i - i - w j s . m a l l t - r n a l Í M - I Í M I Í I I . . , . , ! I . , i l , , , I

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pro.. i " l . s 11Í K . n n c l h IVici-'s sculpturL-—the essential ferling of growth iM.l cviiluiion produced by the egg s h a p e with vilrcous fingers emerg- ing [fig. 1 0 ] , or seen t h r o u g h t h e orifices—is also converted into >'risi,ry data by a similar atlitiult^ to craft (thoiiph very (lilTcrciit from ihiil 1.1 liis ™lli.-a(;uc9).

I l l o l l w - r w o r d » , o n e a s p i - o t o f U n - i i n c - i B r i n i - u l 1 . " ^ \ i i ^ - ' l ' - i-- ' "

MAItfJl ]'M,:t

FLORIDA REPRESENTATIVES - t h e kootz g a l l e r y

57

p Large Jol

E d i t o r ( N Y ) . . . I Editor (SF) . . J a „ . „

n Stanl^ Sollid Andy Warhol, 1^*'^ Brockman Davis, Swept, 1970, mixed 'hoto, Dennis"^*^ '̂̂ ' 3° >< 4° x 6 in. (76.2 x 101.6 x 15.2 cm).

Blocker Collection (artwork © Dale Brockman) IM, Volume III number 3, De- 964. Published monthly except August at 839 Howard Street, Cisco, Subscriptions, $10 per foreign. Distributed by Eastern stributors, 255 7th Avenue, ., N,Y.

DVERTISING OFFICES iarnett. Advertising Manager :isco: 839 Howard Street

EXbrook 2-3821 les: 7231/2 North La Ciénega

657 2179

EDITORIAL OFFICES les: 723'/2 North La Ciénega :isco: 839 Howard Street

0. 3, Oacamber, 1964. Published xcspt July and August. Second al rates paid at San Francisco, and at additional mailing offices, oay b« raproduced only witti tha written permission.

ized artists and practices show up to be noticed, there is litde outcry about a

culture war being waged. Rather than silencing marginal histories, many L.A.

curators used the various levels and kinds of support provided by the Getty to

give voice to less-famüiar artists and narratives, and to interrogate the reasons

their works fell out of the dominant history. Many PST shows, like those men-

tioned above, raise deep questions about the notions of center and periphery,

and whether or not that spatial sense of power is indeed still operable in 2012 in

a centerless city, within a postmodern, multicultural linguistic space, or under

the auspices of a collaborative, networked museological model. The ambivalent

relationship to mainstream institutions and histories may indeed be a profound

shift that says as much about now as it does about 1980.

In his 1993 catalogue essay for the exhibition The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and

Mainstream Criticism, at the University of California Irvine, the artist Charles Gaines,

my father, wrote, "It is virtually impossible to invoke the discourse of marginality

without buttressing the implacable edifice of the mainstream. The black artist is

engaged in a battle for her identity, and there is no possible victory, for to be mar-

98 SPRING 20 12

David Hammons, Bag Lady in Flight, ca. 1970, shopping bags, grease, and hair. 42/2 x 116/2 X 3/2 in, (108 X 295.9 ^ 8.9 cm). Collection Eileen Harris Norton, Santa Monica. California (artwork © David Hammons)

12. Charles Gaines. The Theater of Refusal: Black

Art and Mainstream Criticism, ed. Catherine Lord

exh. cat. (Irvine: Fine Arts Gallery of the University of California, 1993), 16

ginal is to be in the battle."'^ At the height of the identity-politics moment, C

describes marginality as an embattled position. The oppositional presence of the

excluded serves to mark the centrality of the dominant. Gaines is among the art-

ists reconsidered in PST, with work in Now Dig This! and Under the Big Black Sun, and a

musical performance project included in the Performance and Public Art Festival. |

Gaines worked between Central California and New York City in the late 1970s,

and was not part of a Los Angeles scene until the early 1990s. Despite this, his

work serves important functions in the shows that include it. Now Dig This! slyly

singles out one of the few African-American subjects in his Faces series (1978), so

that Gaines serves as an imaginative link between black California and New York

conceptualism, a link that is tenuous to say the least. Before a deconstructive

critique linked conceptual practices to identity projects. Gaines's work, which

appeared in mainstream commercial venues, was not addressed as black art,

despite whatever practical limitations Gaines may have experienced as a black

artist. Accordingly, his text-based work Incomplete Text (1979) is grouped with works |

by Baldessari, Allen Ruppersberg, and Bas Jan Ader in the MOCA exhibition, ori-

enting their pieces around formal rather than cultural similarities, presenting

Gaines as an innovative text artist rather than an innovative black artist. In one

show, race is a positivist force unifying diverse materials; in the other, material

considerations propose transcendence over the limitations of identity. A resur-

gence of interest in Gaines's work suggests that some of the tension between

black artist and conceptual art has receded of late, even since the time of his 1993 j

Theater of Refusal essay, which outlines the ways in which race framed the critical

reception of artists working at that time. Interestingly, while no longer couched inl terms of battle, that process can still be identified in the two ways Gaines's work

is dealt with in these exhibitions.

Gaines quotes the artist Adrian Piper in The Theater of Refusal, who points out

;onspiratorially; "I really think poststructuralism is a plot! It's the perfect ideology*

99 artjournal

In the newest work color is down to "the vaguest of a blush."

The Bodacious Buggerrilla, ca, 1973 (photo graph © Bodacious Buggerrilla)

L IMI\ - Adrian Piper quoted in Gaines, 3.

to promote if you want to co-opt women and people of color and deny them access to the potent toUs of rationality and objectivity." "'As Piper indicates, just as marginalized people sought to validate their own subject positions, critical theory came around to dismantle the very subject status to which these others had attained. At the same time, identity-oriented artworks and exhibitions were entering mainstream institutions and markets during the 1980s and 1990s. The exhibition Gaines curated and his essay illustrated that among the black artists

. who had by then begun to be recognized, their works were typically received „through the idea that race is a limiting factor. In his study of critical responses, Ithis limitation was either read as an anti-aesthetic failure of the works, or a pro- |ductive source of specific imagination and creativity for the artists.

That latter interpretation, which focuses on difference as creative inspiration, lengaged in a kind of pro-difference politics that fostered notable shows of the ¡period and in the decades since. These range from the 1993 Whitney Biennial and many other projects associated with the curator Thelma Golden that have focused on African American identity and representation, to exhibitions like the fairly recent WilCK! Art atid the Feminist Revolution, curated by Connie Butler in 2007 at MOCA, which brought together major women artists whose works had launched critiques of the patriarchal claims embedded in universalist ideas of art. These and other shows made cases for both personal subjectivity and social pluralism as

I appropriate art content, moving from a place of invisibility for blacks, women, and others into an art world that now at least nominally acknowledges the diver- sity of its participants. While the term "identity" still causes alarm when it pre- cedes art, there is now arguably a basic comfort with the idea that different artists have different bodies and come from different places, and that those experiences

¿influence their works. This, after all, in a different form, is the premise of Pacific Standard Time. As in the broader culture, this sensitivity to perspective has accompa- nied race, gender, sexuality, and other identiñcatory structures as they became acceptable elements of not only counterculttiral, but institutional postmodern art discourse since the 1980s.

Since theiT, the public art institutions themselves have changed. This is l%6, (Pace Í

100 SPRING 20 12

K i n g d o m . 75x100'-. 1964. M l St Mary

• Si;riJnr.E

14. To be completely clear: I serve on the staff of LAXART as curator-at-large. Alexandro Segade and ! selected various performance works for the festival in the context of the Talks About Acts series we co-organize. My discussion here of two performances from the series is in no way intended as a review of the works, but rather as a consideration of themes and issues raised in the presentations—some of them rather surprising to me and the other organizers.

'certainly so in L.Á. In 1980 the Getty Museum was little more than a Greco- .oman urn collection in Malibu.The Hammer Museum and the Museum of 'ontemporary Art had not yet been founded, nor had the smaller nonprofits that xliibit contemporary art in L.A. and that have also mounted PST exhibitions.

^Apart from some enduring university galleries and the Watts Tower Art Center, ifew features remain from that period's landscape. LACMA did exist at its current,

•.jHmuch-expanded site, and, as in the presentation of Five Car Stud and Asco: Elite of the '̂ Obscure, it subtly embodies the corrective spirit PST has engendered.

A return to the central question: does this change, in institutions, in repre- ntations, in modes of access, represent the amphfication of radically different

or the assimilation of these voices into a normative power structure? A ¡Bakhtinian idea of carnival has its resonances within this citywide festival and

diversity of representations, and might represent one way to think about the ¡answer to the above question. A carnivalesque, ambivalent, dialogic response

ight be "all of the above." Despite the Getty's monologic effort (the institution a good deal of energy into overseeing all collaborations with smaller institu-

ions and maintaining authority over press releases, schedules, logos, and the ike). Pacific Standard Time cannot help but speak with multiple voices, enabling .terations that exceed the Getty's managerial authority.

cc The Performance and Public Art Festival, coordinated by the Getty and the nonprofit gallery LAXART, and presented over two weeks in January 2012, further demonstrated these ambivalent forces and, among other things, enabled specific instances for the embodied performance of marginalized racial and sexual subjec-] tivities.Tlie platform served as a site for many actions, reenactments, and inven- tive responses to the period in question, including a few events with which this -writer was involved as a curator, featuring artists whose -work has helped frame my o-wn work as an artist working in performance.'"^These performance projects, part of a Talks About Acts series I organized in collaboration -with Alexandro Segade, demonstrated a range of ways in which identity has been historically performed by California artists, and the shifting terms by which these perfor- mances can now be acknowledged and understood. The assimilation of these performances into the visual-art institutions that hosted them is another marker of a shift in the relationship bet-ween central authority and its irritants. Two of these projects brought race and performance into intimate contact: works by the group Bodacious Buggerrilla and by Eleanor Antin.

Supported by the Getty and hosted in its own auditorium, the reunion and reprise performance of a radical street theater troupe, the Bodacious Buggerrilla,

j,,,,began the series ofEcially as a "pre-festival event." The differences between the Getty Museum and the Bodacious Buggerrilla were stark. Founded by the artist Fd Bereal, the troupe satirized American politics and black political life in short plays and actions between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. The reunited troupe, composed of Bereal, Larry Broussard, Bobby Farlice, DaShell Hart,Tendai Jordan, Barbara Lewis, andAlyce Smith Cooper, came together for the first time in many years to perform a play and hold a conversation. They reenacted their short piece Killer Joe, in which a pretentious pimp gets taken down a few notches by his friends, by the Man, by the pigs, by his own hos. At the end of the play, despite his boasting, Joe is left pantsless, earless, and cashless, chased off the stage by his Bible-wielding mother. Timely in South L.A. during the early 1970s, this

Painted Rattan t'Kion 16" hig

101 artjournal

\

mean, untitled wooden sculpture, Esther Robles Gallery

juault. La Jolla Museum.

15. Ed Bereal quoted in John Weisman, Guerrilla Theater: Scenarios for Revolution (Garden City. NY:

Anchor. 1973). 102.

performance resonated with all sorts of real dynamics of that neighborhood. With the performers now in or near their seventies, the presentation in an audi- |torium atop a Brentwood mountain served to complete a historical record, to onsecrate the group's formerly fringe activities, and to contain those elements ithin the bureaucratic limits of the institution—^but also to do the affective work

f reunion that operated beyond institutional oversight. In the time spent prepar- 'ing for, mounting, and reflecting on the event, bonds of friendship and camarade- ïie were renewed, important narratives were passed on and reconsidered, the

iravery of the group's antagonism was valued, and a sense of political continuity letween then and now was articulated, for better or for worse. As moderator and facilitator of the event, I spent two days with the Bodacious Buggerrilla that were lamong the most memorable and influential experiences I've had working in the cultural sphere.

The troupe's director, Bereal, whose art figured prominently in the Getty's own PST exhibition, had previously used assemblage to draw racial critiques from found objects. Disillusioned with the art world, he dropped out and became a

..ftperformer. An anthology of the political theater of the time captures his thinking:

Yeah, because it's like a never-never land; it's like a whirlpool in the sense that it feeds on itself You don't need anybody, man, you know? You do your pictures; you're in a milieu. There are old, fashionable, wealthy ladies who don't know where they are; but it's fashionable to buy your stuff. It's fashion- able to invite you to their house, have cocktails and you do somethin' weird, which increases your number, which sends you back, and you do another

Der picture and then you come out to the cocktail party again. You do somethin' weird for them and give them a httle story to tell the rest of the week; and you make some bread off it because you sell 'em a whole piece: Here's a picture by the guy who just did the funny story I just told you, right. And everyone else goes OOOOOHHHHH and that leads to the next cocktail party,' you know, and it just goes on and on and on like that; it don't mean nothing I at all. And all the time you are truckin' back to the ghetto, you know; I Am Going Back to the Ghetto. And all your fellow ghetto residents are going wow, man, you have a heavy thing goin', wow, that's really heavy. And you even think you got a heavy thing going. And the little rich lady thinks she's got a heavy thing going. She say: Well, I know some people in the ghetto. And her friends say: Really? Wow, you know . . .'*

Bereal's transition from the art circuit to his own collective was a radical move. His audience changed, his work changed, and the risks changed. It is important that art is figured here as a compromised, elitist pastime, while theater

"P.is poised to engage with political realities, Bereal's recollections of the Bodacious Buggerrilla, described in the discussion at the Getty, include run-ins with FBI "OINTEL agents who were cracking down on black radicals. In an allusion to the langers of this work, the troupe reenacted an intervention it used to perform: during a politically direct monologue by Jordan describing the forces of conserva- |tism that stiU operate in oppressive ways, a white audience member jumped up

I his seat, argued with the cast using racist language, and theatrically shot L with a cap gun. Jordan, prepared with a pellet of stage blood, was soon

^covered in red and fell to the floor. The stagecraft of this moment was a little less

ans Gallery

1964. Ceej

Four pages from street location {e.g

Los Angeles, 1971

True, a few painte others), and some this turns out to he

A discernible Pi plastics art, is nov rials, a constiming tion, transparency all in an obsessii gradually to blanc neutral glow. Parí

This can be see| despite their inside-outside ambigtiity. were finite. His new larg. open, plate-glass, free-standing walls, with their infinitely thin opti tal nEleanor Antin, Before the Revolution, 1979, li rcf s p i L ' ; S a n t a B a r b a r a M u s e u m o f A r t , 1 9 7 9 . p e r f o r m a n c e n i n e

t^jj{artwork© Eleanor Antin; photograph provided r J by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York).

thiniForeground: the artist as Eleanora Antinova

band [ Eleanor Antin, Before the Revolution, 1979,

performance. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, ' '''"^2012 (artwork© Eleanor Antin; photograph by

'̂ ^ Omar Gaieck) lens-shape sctilptures of transparent color; nev enlarged his forms to heights of 6 feet or more, tl on matters which have more to do with two dim they turn into perceptual fields more than objec the environment; their extension is lateral, an

100 Boots Parking, Via de la Valle, Calif.. May 17. 1 (mailed: June 28. 1971). Photos by Philip Steinmetz

proa ;aüo ass II. Ti in a

l i i l K

;olor, which in some steriousness of hue. .vith his impeccably 1 composite geomet- tiber of conflicting abandons .seductive

ive" of white rectan- leaning-plank forms

iOt colored at all. 11-sculptures-always started out with an

tract-Pop suggestiveness hut Uiier a simpliflc-ation of the shapesin conjunction with e.xotic and hot color led to a more unified concep-

iridescence on their voluptuously mother-of-pearl grey into elusive

ey are quiet, strange, alive. lajor figure, and a case apart, both in rk, which has taken various forms,

nger artists. Irwin started as painter, Inumerous mediums towards what is -material art. From monochrome colored surfaces were broken only ly close-valued color, he moved to of ephemeral (painted) haze at their ted metal wall-mounted discs and

|ih elaborately worked-out, shadow- \pansion of the object into a staged

mail work: 100 Boots at the Market,

9:30 A M (mailed: June 7. 1971).

—'^^ ''-j¿'-*--=--''̂ -̂íjLl-j.t"-

i6. Alexandro Segade. "Curator's Notes: Eleanor Antin's Revolution." program note for Eleanor Antin. Before the Revolution, January 29. 2012. Hammer Museum. UCLA.

smooth than it might have been forty years ago. It perfectly expressed, however, the social context for the original work, the continuously relevant real-life stakes of the political discussion, and the transgressive quality of this group, vv̂ hich had Inot warned me or the Getty that this messy episode wotild occur. While the Getty staff's nervousness about the event was evident to those of us who organized it and to Bereal himself (who carried his costume billy club with him during talks with staff), the museum's representatives proved quite fiexible in their ability to support and accommodate black street theater as an example of important art from the period. No one on our end was reprimanded for the unannounced spill- ing of fake blood all over the stage.

Eleanor Antin's Before the Revolution was the grand finale of the Performance and Public Art Festival. Staged as an evening-length play at the Hammer Museum, it was a reworking of Antin's original narrative piece, performed by her and large Masonite dolls at The Kitchen in New York in 1979, for this expanded return. The play follows one of Antin's well-known characters, Eleanora Antinova, the black ballerina. In the 1970s, Antin, whose work brought eccentric theatricality to the emergent performance art of the time, not only performed Antinova, but attempted to live as her for a period, wearing slightly dark makeup and enacting a convoluted fantasy through which race, gender, and artistic mastery were cleverly entangled. While Antin's practice of cross-racial performance did and does raise eyebrows, it was a rare instance of racism being critically addressed within the milieu ofthat era's dominantly white cadre of influential artists. In Antinova's scripted arguments with her ballet master, questions of representation are tied to the powers of Eurocentrism and framed through estranged performances, drawing attention to ideas of performativity that would be more fully articulated in the art and writing of coming decades. The questions raised earlier about inclusion and representation are acted out in Antinova's insistence that she play Marie Antoinette, and Diaghilev's insistence that she cannot, that her body only authorizes her to play Cleopatra or Pocahontas.

In his curator's note for the 2012 program, Segade explains;

The character is quixotic and quizzical, a great dancer whose career is nega- tively impacted by the fact of her race in contrast to her nationality (black v. Russian), her over-determined relationship to gender (ballerina!), and her place in history (Classicism v. Modernism v. Post-). . . .This radical figure functions as a site for critique of the contradictory and constructed divisions among races, classes, careers, histories, and even artistic forms.""

Segade taps into the disciplinarity that has been challenged throughout PST, draw- ing an important parallel between formal artistic distinctions and cultural divi- sions, and proposing the possibility that the critique of each is reflected in the other. Antin's own 2012 program note focuses on the difficulties of mixing theater and art that vexed her original work;

Performance artists were supposed to position themselves as anti-theatre. So Yvonne Rainer called her marvelous, literary, dramatic movements "anti-dance." Why would a sophisticated talented artist think that "dance" only meant bal- let, modern, folk, ballroom, whatever? Why were sneakers any less a dance prop than toe-shoes? When Linda Montano andTehching Hsieh were chained

104 S P R I N G 2 0 1 2

MMER 1970 together for a year, wasn t that theater? Wasn t Bas Jan Ader s kamikaze engage- ment with the Atlantic Ocean theater? More recently when Marina Abramovic in her favorite role of goddess held court inside the palace of modern art and looked into the eyes of strangers and changed their lives, wasn't that theater?''

Antin's stirring defense of theater, long-declared enemy of modern art, accompa- nied a new production in which she turned the primary performance responsi- bilities over to a cast of actors and a theater director. Early in the process, Alex and I encouraged Antin to cast an African American actress to play Eleanora Antinova. On my part, this was both from fear of facilitating, explaining, and even (Watching a blackface performance, but also from an equal interest in finally giving

tinova a black voice. In her piece, Antin had divided the performing presence tween her authorial body and the inanimate doUs, a Brechtian critical com-

'plexity that could support the difficulties of the racial performance. But the piece ^ a s always designed as a play, and Antin's intention was always that it cotild be performed as such. Here was the opportunity to embody the characters in a [troupe of actors under the artist's direction, reworking the role of identity vis-à- is character. Here, the ideas of shifting racial categories and migrating art disci- ilines transformed each other. This project emerged as a central element of the

¡festival, subject of several articles and profiles, symbolizing the recuperative pow- ;rs of the series. In carnivalesque manner, these irresolvable categorical problems

[served to characterize the entire project. These and other festival projects exceeded the official art-historical order,

bringing unpredictable live interactions into the Pacific Standard Time sphere, and further insisting that whue many things were done wrong in the past, some things were actually done quite well. It has been quite an experience to see Los

igeles of the present unfold backward through time, and to interrogate the [terms by which L.A. art has been rearbitrated and renegotiated. The attempt to tandardize a history of Southern California art has been met by the locad tradi-

tion of history-less-ness that has made Los Angeles a place of radical reinvention. By depicting history not as a centralizing progressive force but as a coUection of forces shaped by a particular provincial context, the Getty has used its singular resources to empower a series of historical interventions. The coalition of

ominance and exclusion has produced a number of wonderful exhibitions and projects, plenty of awkward bureaucratic mismatches, and a revised record of alternative art histories. The local effort may appear as the apotheosis of provin- cialism to the outside world. Regardless, the project works beyond the specific historic content put forward, prominently modeling a contemporary arrangement of networked power, a structure that exceeds any central ordering authority, and drawing attention to that power's interest in and ability to administer differences.

Malik Gaines is assistant professor of art at l-lunter Coiiege, CUNY, and a member of the group My Barbarian, which has performed and exhibited internationally. He has contributed writing to numerous art publications and catalogues, including monographs for Mark Bradford, Andrea Bowers, Sharon Hayes, Glenn Ligon, and Wangechi Mutu. Gaines holds a PhD in theater and performance studies from UCLA, having researched the transnational politics of race and gender in performances of the 1960s.

17. Eleanor Antin, program note for her Before the Revolution. January 29, 2012, Hammer Museum, UCtA.

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