The exhibition David Hammons: Five Decades at the Mnuchin Gallery left me feeling cold and disquieted. Not that this artist's work, which I've long admired, is not brilliant, passionate and deeply moving. It's that there is a terrible, chilling disconnect between the work and the venue. This disconnect is something sought by Hammons, which he exploits to politically and racially pointed ends. The exhibition critiques the gallery, the art market and the historically, predominantly white art world as a whole, systems that financially support his work and hold it in high esteem. David Hammons is an African-American artist, now 72-years-old. He emerged on the L.A. art scene in the late sixties in the context of the Watts Riots and the ensuing … [Read more...]
John Outterbridge: Rag Man
Among the recent works by John Outterbridge on view at Art + Practice in Los Angeles are two very different series of modestly-scaled, wall-mounted assemblages, each of which evokes aspects of the African-American experience. One is sculptural in nature, the works being made with a wide assortment of castoff objects; the other is aligned with painting, the pieces consisting both of flat and "stuffed" (puffy) pieces of fabric painted in bright colors. Both series consist of works that appear to have been constructed in a most casual and offhand manner. Although contemplation reveals that formal and conceptual clarity underlies these works, their literal scrappiness and wholly unpretentious (almost Outsider Art) nature is fundamental to … [Read more...]
Sarah Sze on My Mind
While Sarah Sze's last show at Tanya Bonakdar consisted of several dazzling, sensorial and thought-provoking installations, one modest, barely there assemblage lingers in my mind's eye. Entitled Lavender Landscape Standing (2015), it consisted of a small (perhaps 3 x 2 inch) rock that had been split down the middle, two torn sheets of paper, one all black, the other in shades of lavender, apparently fragments of images printed out from the Internet, and tiny blobs and thread-like strings of blue paint supported by (or otherwise set in relation to) a tall, thin stainless steel armature.This was just one of a myriad of freestanding pieces that made up the environmental installation occupying the main downstairs space in Sze's exhibition, … [Read more...]
Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada at LACMA
Despite the existence of a 10-acre sculpture park devoted to his work in Joshua Tree, CA, Noah Purifoy was largely unknown to the mainstream art world until the Getty's Pacific Standard Time exhibitions shed light on the artist, his career and his contributions. A single junk assemblage by Purifoy appeared in Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970, at the Getty proper and a half-dozen works were featured in Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 at the Hammer. It is perhaps as a result of this newfound exposure that America Is Hard to See, the exhibition that opened the Whitney Museum's new building, presented a work by Purifoy in its "Scotch Tape" section devoted to assemblage and collage (see image below … [Read more...]