ART CITIES:N.York-LA Invitational
In the postwar years, the wide open spaces of Los Angeles provided a kind of freedom that allowed it to become the conceptual hub of contemporary American art that it is today. “LA Invitational” presents diverse artistic endeavors in order to reveal common threads in artistic responses to the city’s landscape, culture, and light.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive
“LA Invitational” is an exhibition of works by Los Angeles-based artists: Chris Burden, Frank Gehry, Piero Golia, Mark Grotjahn, Thomas Houseago, Alex Israel, Mike Kelley, Nancy Rubins, Sterling Ruby, Ed Ruscha, Robert Therrien, Jeff Wall, Mary Weatherford, and Jonas Wood. Many works have been made specifically for the exhibition, while others are being shown in New York for the first time. Chris Burden’s “Three Ghost Ships” (1991) is a set of full-size sailboats, fitted with solar panels and global satellite software for unmanned navigation. Burden intended that these vessels, carrying a small cargo of tea, sail together from Charleston, South Carolina, and appear miraculously in the harbor of Plymouth, England, reversing the famous journey of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María, the three ships used by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage across the Atlantic, and invoking the Boston Tea Party. Mike Kelley’s “EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITY PROJECTIVE RECONSTRUCTION #19 (SHY SATANIST)” (2004–05) is a video installation based on common American performance rituals: school plays, Halloween, St. Patrick’s Day, award ceremonies, dress-up day at work. It is one of the thirty-two separate video chapters comprising his feature-length “musical” “Day Is Done”. Each scenario in “Day Is Done” is based on images that Kelley found in high-school yearbooks, followed by an exhaustive process of research. Using primary images as a starting point, Kelley created narrative action and music for each, like the set staging of a period Hollywood drama. Writes Kelley: “For this project, I limited myself to specific iconographic motifs taken from the following files: Religious Performances, Thugs, Dance, Hick and Hillbilly, Halloween and Goth, Satanic, Mimes, and Equestrian Events. Many of the source photographs are of people in costume singing or dancing, so the resulting tapes are generally music videos. In fact, I consider Day Is Done to be a kind of fractured feature-length musical…. The experience of viewing it is somewhat akin to channel-surfing on television”. In Jeff Wall’s “Property Line” (2015), two surveyors mark a patch of dirt on the outskirts of California City, located about 100 miles outside of Los Angeles, capturing the exact moment at which nature is transformed into property. Alex Israel’s “Sky Backdrop” (2016) depicts Los Angeles’s wide skies in scenographic terms, while Mary Weatherford, shows her first large-scale painting since joining Gagosian that captures the shifting atmosphere of the Pacific coast, evoking the sky and sea in painted layers and glowing, neon light. Mark Grotjahn’s “Untitled (Turkish Forest V Face 43.94)” (2012) is the largest example of his iconic “face paintings” to date. The “Turkish Forest” series is a single work comprising eleven paintings; nine were shown together in 2014 at the Punta della Dogana in Venice. Evolving out of Grotjahn’s “Butterfly” series, the work features a dichromatic scheme of red and blue oil paint, applied layer by layer with a brush and a palette knife, the colors building upon each other to an almost sculptural effect.
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 26/10-16/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com