Welcome to “To See or Not to See,” a recurring column covering a handful of exceptional Los Angeles gallery and museum exhibitions—the good, the bad, and the criminally overrated—in easily digestible, bite-size pieces.
As you may have heard, galleries won’t stop opening in Los Angeles. Fueled by the boom in e-commerce that erupted during lockdown, the commercial art world is now in its Manifest Destiny era, marked by a mantra of endless expansion and countless galleries launching first, second, and third locations in LA. But I have to say, the mood is very fast fashion, with a seemingly endless supply of poor-quality paintings that read better online than they do in real life. This is the art market’s equivalent to shopping at Shein: Everything feels disposable.
Time, however, is an excellent filter. Lately the artists I’ve found worth talking about are all either passed or decades into their career; their works have both outlived the fleeting momentum of novelty and hype and predate the speculative asset market around contemporary art by emerging artists. Before we start, I’d like to share painter Claire Tabouret’s secret to longevity, a piece of advice for other artists she told me on a recent studio visit: “You have to keep an extremely high standard for yourself because the art world won’t have high standards; it’s just this big monster that wants more paintings.” Eventually, however, in the absence of quality, “They get bored and move on.”
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“Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848” at David Zwirner
Image Credit: Janelle Zara for ARTnews Although he’s lived in Los Angeles for the last 12 years, Stan Douglas hasn’t had a solo show here in 20. He falls into a specific category of artists represented by only a narrow sliver of LA galleries: conceptual and blue-chip but who does not make paintings. As one of two solo shows inaugurating David Zwirner’s new East Hollywood space(s), Douglas makes his LA return with works that debuted at last year’s Venice Biennale: five large-scale photographs depicting mostly aerial scenes of civil unrest from 2011, the year of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. The gag, however, is that the hundreds of protestors’ faces are all vividly, improbably, disturbingly in focus, triggering a sensation of the uncanny valley. Imagine looking down from an airplane and making out the expressions of all the tiny, tiny people.
I love it. Visually and conceptually, the work broaches the painstakingly absurd hyperreality of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal. Douglas shot and directed actors to superimpose onto fabricated cityscapes—collages of 100-megapixel photos shot from helicopters, which were then digitally de-gentrified to match archival Google Satellite data. But they embrace the academic compositions of, say, history paintings of 1848, a landmark year in European micro-revolutions. In both those works and his, you see the theatrical staging of hundreds of anonymous figures on the battlefield of the city center, highlighting an important fact: all revolutionary scenes we’ve accepted as historical accounts are actually just products of the artist’s imagination.
Through July 29, at 616 N. Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90004.
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“Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Coming Back to See Through, Again” at David Zwirner
Image Credit: Janelle Zara for ARTnews Jean Baudrillard coined the term “hyperreality” to describe a condition of representation indistinguishable from reality—when images look so real they must be fake, in other words. The household objects in Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s new and recent paintings, also an inaugural Zwirner show, are rendered so hyper-realistically they appear as images projected or superimposed onto the surface of the composition. Conversely, faces tend to recede, presenting themselves as the cut-outs of vintage photographs. Like Douglas, she’s an artist conceptually invested in collage, layering imagery to flatten perspective and deploying archival photographs to merge past and present. Shown side by side, these two artists read as inversions of each other: Summoning an art historical nostalgia, Douglas makes photographs of paintings, while Akunyili Crosby’s paintings and collages of photographs, in large part depictions of her native Nigeria, evince the strikingly personal nostalgia of homesickness.
Through July 29, at 616 N. Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90004.
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“Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Image Credit: Janelle Zara for ARTnews These 80 works, curated by Hollis Goodall, Leslie Jones, and Richard Speer, are meant to illustrate the creative exchange between the late Sam Francis and various Japanese artists; from 1957 onward, the late California Abstract Expressionist had spent substantial time in Japan. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but his paintings here—mainly cheerful palettes of watercolors splattered on white canvases—look so deeply unserious shown next to the intensity of works by Gutai and Mono-ha artists. They lack the muscular presence of Shimamoto Shozo’s 1961 untitled painting, a textured surface of sand and rust-colored oil paint that resounds with the sheer force with which they were thrown against the canvas. They don’t aspire to the poetic translucence and opacity of ink pooled on paper like Matsumi (Mike) Kanemitsu’s Last Page, 9 a.m. (1973–74). And Yoshihara Jiro’s 1966 untitled black circle simply emanates with an almost spiritual investment in perfection. The precision and intensity of these works drowns Francis out, making his presence feel comparatively very thin. In his pursuit of Japanese concepts of empty space, he only succeeds when working at large scale. The slightest slivers of unpainted surface in Katsumi Satsuo’s black-and-gray screenprint Air (1976) makes much greater impact at a tenth of the size.
Through July 16, at 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036.
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“Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982” at LACMA
Image Credit: Janelle Zara for ARTnews LACMA’s Leslie Jones curated the show of 20th-century computer-generated art that we didn’t know we needed. Think of it as a palate cleanser following the boom-and-bust cycle of NFTs, the momentary aberration in which digital art was synonymous with investment strategy. For decades, artists have been using computers to pose existential, surprisingly contemporary questions. In 1979, Barbara T. Smith staged a performance of two early chatbots, one programmed as a psychoanalyst and the other schizophrenic. When no breakthrough in therapy arrived, she noted the limitations of ChatGPT before it was even a glimmer in its programmer’s eye: AI does not produce unique answers, only reconfigurations of what’s already been said. Other artists wrote algorithms as depersonalized counterpoints to Abstract Expressionism’s subjectivity, yielding the dry conceptualism of Sol LeWitt’s permutations and Charles Gaines’s manually pixelated grids, or simple programs to make marks on paper. In 1964, engineer A. Michael Noll taught a computer the dimensions of Mondrian’s 1917 painting Composition in Line, producing results that failed to capture the rhythms of the original. (Similar experiments are ongoing.) Artist Vera Molnár later programmed the work of Paul Klee into a computer in 1970 and managed to capture his levity, brightness, and motion, which brings me to the same conclusion I had in the last edition of this column: you can make art without the artist’s hand, but not without the artist’s eye.
Through July 2, at 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036.
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“Sarah Charlesworth: Neverland” at Karma
Image Credit: Courtesy Karma Gallery I like to think of art in terms of the artist’s presence in the work. Shozo’s physicality lives in the texture of his paintings; Akunyili Crosby’s images project a lovingly potent nostalgia. With the late Sarah Charlesworth, there is an exactitude, a diligent commitment to fine-tuning composition, exposure, and materiality to absolute perfection. Her exquisite 2002 “Neverland” series comprises ordinary objects—teacups, a mask, a book, fruits—shot against a monochrome seamless and printed via Cibachrome, a process prized for its clarity of image, color, and anti-light-scattering qualities. If you’ve never seen them in person, I recommend starting up close and identifying the contours of the subject; in Candle (2002), as in many of the works, subject and background are the exact same color. A placeless red candle floats in an ultra-saturated red abyss, punctuated by the uncanny brightness of a single, luminous flame. How far does this abyss go? It has no sheen, reflection, or perceptible texture, and so it achieves the ganzfeld effect: duality of both flat plane and rich, endless void. Step back from the piece and you’ll notice the frame is precisely the same texture and color. Suddenly the abyss is in the room with you, marking my third and final reference to the hyperreal.
Through July 7, at 7351 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90046.