Profiles in New Year Realities and Dreams

So I decided it was time to take Investment Banking off my profile listing for occupation. I am not sure how it ended up on my profile and I noticed that it was there several months into writing the blog. And when I noticed it, I thought it sounded cool and nobody looks at my profile anyway. Something about it made me happy. But really, I am so far from an investment banker and any one of the group of bloggers that I can count on my right hand that read this blog would find that pretty obvious. But I couldn't bring myself to list my current "career" so I just left it with Arts.

And Now We're Ten Years On...

in Los Angeles. The U-Haul puttered in on the 10 from Vegas ten years ago on the Fourth. Big D always seemed to find that symbolic. I never got it. Still not sure what it all means or if it even should. But I thought it worthwhile enough to mention, so there you have it. Never thought I'd still be here. If you asked me ten years ago as I was unpacking into my bungalow in Los Feliz where I would be today I would have said, or at least thought, some mud hut in Africa or a houseboat on the Huong River.

That's Wack!

WACK! closes July 16 so if you haven't seen it yet, you should stop by the Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo and see this important exhibition of feminist art during the late 1960's and '70's. I had been meaning to see Wack! since it opened in March but finally had some time off from work (not by choice but by circumstance) and used one of the afternoons off to see this incredible collection of feminist art. I came of age in the period following this group of second wave feminists and looked at these works as ground, the foothold that supports female artists today. In school, we studied these works. We used their language but we questioned and even poked fun at the anger and the frustration--how quaint those pre-global, pre-internet (pre-photoshop) times were! We were the Gen-X third wave feminists tip-toeing across the millennium and we could love our whore just as much as our Madonna because these foremothers had punished themselves enough for all of us and now we were all cleansed and Amen.

But seeing the exhibit and these works as a whole movement rather than selected female pieces was awe-inspiring, difficult, powerful, thought-provoking, and joyful and wrought with pain. This is life and art and the personal was, and I think still is, political. This exhibit argues that these female artists not only influence current female artists but contribute in a profound way to the foundation for all contemporary art, period. No pun intended.

If you can't see the exhibit, you can check out the website:
http://www.moca.org/wack/

The only thing that was weird was the high-anxiety guards in the Geffen. They have at least one posted at every corner of the space and they follow you around and kinda stand next to you when you are viewing the work like they are guarding a prison and you are the prisoner who might revolt. It added a very strange touch to seeing this exhibit.

Los Angeles and Artistic Vision

There's a lot of writing as of late about Los Angeles as the center of the cultural universe. These people aren't talking about just pop culture such as the possibility of Paris Hilton going to jail for DUI or Winona Ryder trying to make a comeback. Los Angeles has become the art mecca of the 21st century--where NY and everywhere else look to to see what's goin' on, so to speak. I can dig it, I get, and I've been gettin' it since I moved here in '97. Here are a few recent tidbits...



Werner Herzog (from this Esquire article)

Los Angeles is the city with the most substance in the United States--cultural substance. There is a competition between New York and Los Angeles, but New York only consumes culture and borrows it from Europe. Things get done in Los Angeles.




Caryn Coleman (from this abLA article)

Sometimes I read articles on the art world and, in particular, Los Angeles that make me wonder if I'm living on a totally different art world planet than the people writing or quoted in the piece. Last week there were two such things that made me feel this way...

On Artforum.com's diary Painting the Town by Andrew Berardini, says:
Los Angeles loves to hate painters—whether homegrown or imported.Really???? I don't think I've ever had that conversation or if that opinion (if partially true) is strong enough in LA to make such a bold statement.

And then the New York Times had the article The Art’s Here. Where’s the Crowd? about LA art scene (downtown, the Hammer, you know the drill) and Gary Garrels is quoted as saying:
“The rest of the world is promoting the city as well or better than L.A. does,” said Gary Garrels, the chief curator at the Hammer Museum, who moved here two years ago from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “All of the curators and galleries that are dynamic are coming to Los Angeles and looking at what’s going on here.”Ok, so I'll admit that I actually do a bit more business with people on the east coast than in LA sometimes but I can't imagine that the rest of the world is promoting LA as much as LA is let alone more. I mean, even this NYT article is about a year after the fact.