Culver City — All of a Sudden
I came to Culver City all of a sudden a couple of months ago after nearly 30 years in San Diego. I was fairly well known there as an artwriter and critic. I also opened and ran contemporary art gallery for a couple of years. For a while, I hobnobbed with the greats and near greats of the local art scene.
All of that is quite a ways back now. More recently, except for an occasional feature story written for a high-end lifestyle magazine and a couple of not quite art publications, I’ve pretty much faded from the art scene - much as the San Diego art scene faded from itself.
Then, most recently, with all kinds of fading going on everywhere due to the recession, my few writing gigs dried up and disappeared. This was followed by my day job at a national design center. It started fitfully fading, then vanished altogether when the entire company went belly up.
No writing gigs. No day job. I was at the end of a rope. Or the rope was at the end of me.
In the meantime, my 91 year old mom was increasingly showing signs of her age and needing help to carry on. She lives in a small condo near Culver City which has a small and rarely used second bedroom/office. Figuring that we would be helping each other out, we agreed that I would move in. So that’s what I did a couple of months ago to find myself in L.A.
I figured that L.A. would offer a far bigger art scene than San Diego in which to find art and galleries to write about. So I started to look around. Although nobody in San Diego had uttered much more than word about Culver City, it wasn’t long at all before I realized that I’d arrived at a spot adjacent to a gold mine of galleries within a five minute drive of where I was living - something like 20 serious galleries within a mile of each other on South La Cienega and Washington Boulevards.
Writing about all this art could keep me busy forever. Maybe get some spending money, although there was no publication clammoring for my work.
“Do a blog,” my friends said.
Okay, so I’ll do a blog.
But where to begin?
Beginnings - Cardwell/Jimmerson
BEGINNINGS - Cardwell/Jimmerson
Cardwell/Jimmerson Contemporary Art, Washington Blvd.
For reasons having to do with impulse and parking, Cardwell/Jimmerson Contemporary Art, on Washington Blvd was one of the first galleries I visited when I started checking out my new neighborhood. Tom Jimmerson had just finished installing a show of L.A. and southern California artists of the 1960s, mostly the earlier years. These were not the big name artists readily associated with that era such as the Three Eds; Ed Moses, Ed Ruscha, and Ed Keinholtz –but the artists who were well enough known at the time but have since radically changed style or been mostly forgotten. That happens.
Tom Eatherton, "Point Set 12" acrylic and laquer on board, 43"x43" 1966
In putting the show together, Tom relied on conversation with old-timers, early issues of ArtForum (it was new and Southern California based then) and catalogs of exhibitions at small regional museums. He’d then contact the artists (those still living) and/or their galleries (if still living) and/or their collectors (if still living) to identify and assemble the paintings and sculptures that comprise the exhibition.
Barry Le Va "Power Plant" 72"x67.5" acrylic on canvas 1966
This is a rare and admirable approach to being a gallery - requiring thoughtfulness, scholarship, and patience. It also reflects a curiosity about artists whose work may have been inappropriately ignored or misperceived; a chance to rediscover a body of work all but hidden from current awareness.
Cardwell/Jimmerson doesn’t do this kind of show every time. They’ll chase the hottest and the newest thing along with the other galleries, but the historical perspective such exhibitions bring serves as a reminder of art’s uncertainties, its fickleness from one moment to the next. In the process, they enrich and challenge the entire contemporary art scene and tell some truths about it.
Toward the end of my conversation with Tom, I asked if there was someplace nearby where I could get a cup of coffee and a sandwich or something; somewhere where the people who go to the galleries and buy the art, the people who work in the galleries, and the people who make the art that’s shown in the galleries go to get a drink or a sandwich or something, and maybe hang out and talk. That would be a good place to find, I said.
Tom said there was a bar like that on La Cienega, a barely noticeable place around the corner about half way up the block on the east side. He didn’t know the name of the place and he didn’t know if it would be open. “But you should check it out,” he said.
So I checked it out.
I walked around the corner and half way up the block and found a modest little building that said “bar” on the outside.
“This must be the place,” I thought
It was around two in the afternoon and the place was closed.
There was no sign that said what it’s called.
Mandrake’s Rocks
Mandrake’s Rocks
Mandrake's La Cienega facade
There’s a barely noticeable bar in the middle of a one block stretch of La Cienega between Washington and Venice Boulevards where the two are almost close enough to hold hands. The block is full of contemporary art galleries - ten of them in all - and not one of them schlocky or touristy. That’s a lot of serious galleries for one block in any city. The bar presents itself to the street with one of those seemingly characterless facades behind which anything could be happening.
Proportioned like the end of a shoebox, it’s covered in rough textured white plaster. To the facade’s right side, there’s a frameless quadrangle of glass block through which nothing of the interior can be discerned. As far to the left as it can go, a recess about the size of a telephone booth breaks into the otherwise flat plane of the facade to offer access to a sturdy steel door with its own small glass window. It also reveals nothing of what’s inside. For outdoor signage, there’s no visible ID anywhere, just the street address near the roof line and, near the door, a small white neon sign that spells out “bar.“
I was confident that I’d found the place I was looking for but it was closed. All I could do was look at it from the outside, which turned out to be a more interesting experience than I would have thought. The design of its few elements revealed a subtlety, a minimalist sensibility, that made me wonder whether this was conscious design and not just an accident of a history that was probably fifty or sixty years old.
In large part because I was just standing there on the sidewalk thinking architecturally and designerly, my attention was drawn to a large patch of greenery in front of the bar. I soon realized that this patch of greenery was just about the only and certainly the biggest and most verdant green patch anywhere on this part of La Cienega, which is otherwise lined by utterly unimaginative ficus trees poking out of the sidewalk at regular intervals with their dense leafy canopies totally obscuring anything and everything behind them.
Mandrake street "garden"
This green patch consisted of roughly 50% beautifully luxuriant and well fed crab grass and 50% lush tall beach grasses waving and blowing in the early afternoon’s light breezes. The crab grass could have grown there by accident, but not the lush tall grasses. The same, too with the third element of this green patch: a group of larger and smaller rocks informally piled together amidst the crab grass at the northern end of this landscape.
Clearly this was a well and thoroughly designed place, though it doesn’t look like it until you look at it. It made me like the place already, even though I hadn’t been inside because it was closed.
Only later did I learn that the design of the place was intentional in every aspect - except for the rocks. I learned that the first and largest of the rocks had just shown up one morning shortly after the green patch had been planted with its lush tall grasses; and that all the other rocks had just shown up in the same way thereafter, as if they’d followed the big one - one at a time.
Mandrake's rocks
I also learned that the name of the place is Mandrake. I learned other things, too. For example, I learned that the story of the rocks that I was first told and that I’ve written about here is incorrect, except for the part about the first and the biggest one.
(More about Mandrake and its rocks to come later.)
The First and the Biggest — Blum and Poe
Blum and Poe was the first gallery to arrive and it’s still the biggest in the Culver City area. Relocating from L.A.’s Chinatown and internationally known, everyone acknowledges that its arrival in 2003 pulled the other galleries into the neighborhood and inspired the birth of some new ones. Its exterior is as uninspiring as all of its neighbors’ but its interior, at 5000 sq ft, is significantly more generous, featuring two exhibition spaces with interior volumes that seem almost cathedral like. This feels particularly true when the galleries were hung with Chris Vasell’s recent paintings which occupied both spaces for Blum and Poe’s August show.
In the first gallery, Vasell shows five large paintings whose imagery consists of intestines, bowels, brains and other bodily stuff. In some of the paintings, the parts appear to be massed on a table that isn’t quite level, making the guts puddle up against each other and the edges of the formats. It’s all very ooey-gooey; far from easy for the eyes to dwell upon and far from most notions of ‘pretty’ or ‘beautiful.’ On the other hand, given the very wide range of images seen on canvas these days, it doesn’t seem all that wild, weird or shocking either.
"To The People That Know This Is Nowhere." Installation view.
Vasell’s color consists of oddly vibrant tones of grayed purples, browned reds, burnt greens, and troubled yellows - hues that might look more familiar in a tattoo parlor than in the typical painter’s studio. This paint inhabits its surfaces more than it covers it, again suggesting a tattoo. This suggestion is further enhanced by the lightly suntanned Caucasian flesh tone of the canvasses which makes the paintings resemble even more closely the look of freshly tattooed skin; minus the hair, of course.
If the work in this series represents an attempt to merge the physical and expressive character of painting and tattooing, it doesn’t quite succeed. As painting, its grittiness, both physical and expressive is only illusory, as it must be. Canvas is only canvas while only flesh and bone are flesh and bone.
The relative weakness of these paintings is confirmed by the way that they work best when seen in each other’s company in the specific spaces of the gallery at Blum and Poe in which they’re shown. It actually seems that the dimensions of the paintings, were calculated to play off the dimensions of the walls they hang on; walls Vasell would be familiar with because he’d shown here twice before. Because of this neat fit between between the paintings and their walls, the outcome has more of the feeling of an installation - more impressive as a whole than any of the individual works are by themselves. While such a close knitting between a group of paintings and their surroundings might constitute a worthy accomplishment for an interior designer, but it’s a dubious achievement for a painter.
The paintings are part of a series titled “To The People That Know This Is Nowhere.” The enigmatic title arouses wonder about what the “This” refers to, and what kind of nowhere. The question comes up only because the paintings; whether seen either as representational imagery or more simply as a group of lumpy lines, shapes and colors; are as much of an enigma as the title under which they’re exhibited.
Fortunately, things get better in the second gallery.
Three of the four paintings here share the series title,” To The People of Los Angeles.” They are very similar to each other but very different from the paintings Vasell shows in the first gallery even though they’re part of the same exhibition. To begin with, their construction is very different, working literally on two levels; or more accurately, on two layers .
"To the People of Los Angeles" Installation view
The first layer is a format filling Op Art-ish image of two interlocking concentric rings representing some sort of radiance like the wave pattern produced by a pair of loud speakers partially submerged in a pool of water and blasting forth the fourth note of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Vasell creates the image using a translucent color that might be the sum of the colors in the paintings in the first gallery, but much paler and more varied in its density. The proximity to Op Art is evident here; Op of the type practiced by Brigette Riley, among others, using line that was primarily curvilinear.
The second level/layer of these works consists of precision cut one inch squares of raw canvas precisely aligned in a rectilinear grid across the paintings’ entire surface. The proximity to Op Art is evident here as well; Op of the type practiced irritatingly by Victor Vasarelly in the 1970s and wildly popular in the poster world for several of those years.
Detail. "To the People of Los Angeles"
The fusion of curvilinear Op Art with rectilinear Op Art does not double the Op effects but in fact reduces them by half. This is a thankful result and produces paintings which are visually dynamic and intriguing for the eye.
These paintings don’t play to their architectural surround in the way that the first gallery’s paintings do. It’s a disassociation which serves the paintings well. They don’t need it.
There’s one more painting in the exhibition, the only one from the series, “To The People of Alhambra.” Here, over an undifferentiated thoroughly black first level/layer, Vasell constructs his second level/layer grid using near white bleached canvas squares whose size is not consistent and whose threads hang out all over the place. This only amplifies the Op Art effect of creating visual jitterbuggery that drives some people crazy and gives most eyes headaches.
"To The People of Alhambra" Installation view
The work makes sense as a practice piece or as a study, for the others constructed similarly, but why was it in the show? Because Vasell doesn’t particularly like the people of Alhambra?.
Whatever the case, it’s the people of Los Angeles who fare the best in this exhibition.
Blum and Poe's recent and first location in Culver City area.
The Chris Vasell exhibition is the last to be offered in the 5,000 square foot building that Blum and Poe Gallery has occupied since arriving in Culver City (technically L.A.; but who’s counting).
Early in October, 2009, the gallery will present its exhibitions in its new space directly across La Cienega from its old location. The new gallery provides 21,000 square feet. This is serious growth.
Blum and Poe's new location - open October 3, 2009
To Billis Gallery and Tony Brown
Tony Brown, #0730, mixed media, 2007, 17" x 45"
The work originates with broken and abandoned materials Brown recovers from sites around L.A. where old houses are being demolished. These materials have been part of the same objects for perhaps decades and through their long relationship, have gained an almost palpable comfort and familiarity with each other. He’s particularly attracted to this quality in old wooden chairs.
With a high level of craftsmanship that’s never fussy or fetishistic, Brown uses these materials to create roughly torso sized (and sometimes vaguely torso shaped) works by rearranging elements like an arm rest, leg , seat bottom or rocker rail from a particular chair, then altering them so they form a solid surface and lay more or less flat within a compact plane. He fills any voids, a seat bottom frame for example, with less identifiable parts from the same chair, altering and cutting the pieces to form various geometric patterns that fit neatly within the void and within the overall piece.
Tony Brown #0729, mixed media, 25" x 41"
The results are not improvisations on the theme of ‘chair’ but a group of works that appeal to and hold the eye’s attention without calling on any exterior narrative. With some pieces more than others, it can become tempting to mentally reconstruct the chair as it had once existed as functional parts of a real world, but the game wouldn’t prove worth playing partly because their ‘chairness’ is not disguised or mysterious, and partly because of the greater satisfaction the purely visual experience of the works offers. This emphasis on the visual is the core strength of the constructivist approach and points to why, after nearly 100 years of practice, it continues to attract and reward the creative energy of artists.
Brown also exhibits several collages constructed of pages taken from fashion advertisements in 1940s magazines printed entirely in shades of gray. With surgical precision, he removes all aspects of the images that imply specific personality — for example, the face, the hands — and inserts identically shaped paper printed with a complementary gray shade or a griddy lace-like pattern of some sort.
Tony Brown, "Large Inlay," paper collage, 2007 25" x 17"
Any advertising copy receives the same treatment; the specific is removed for the general. The results are haunting and quietly beautiful - a grayscale dream world from another era. In their concept and their manufacture, they reflect the same constructivist imagination and skill seen in the artist’s works based in rescued old chairs.
George Billis Gallery, La Cienega