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Michael Pearce pushed his way through stalls of feel-good luxury and pseudo-meaningful art to identify the center of worthwhile creation in the city of angels’ largest art fair
Short lines waited between long stanchions. A grey-bearded man wearing a black long leather Matrix jacket stood behind an elderly Jew reading the New York Times. A weary security guard stood watch over an overweight, badly dressed and downhill queen who was ticketless and angrily insisting “Someone’s GOING to let me in.” Too early to be acceptably drunk, and too late for a hangover. Seeing a press pass lanyard, he faked a theatrically ostentatious phone call, noisily dictating copy to an imaginary intern for a release about an exploitative benefit show of work by emerging artists. Almost as loud, strident and adolescent bohemian messages were made up in imitation of American municipal street signs. Slogans read: “You have shit in your ass,” “Your children will hate you eventually,” “Your lifestyle f***ed the others.” Slagging off the bourgeoisie is an old tradition — Alfred Jarry would be proud and snap back an absinthe Ubu-salute to the bobo-bashers. Merde! No one cared. Cellphones glowed noon. Efficient bags were searched and prompt and present covid cards were checked, and the wrist-banded file was shepherded through the protective rank of uniforms and barricades into the concrete shelter of the thick walls of the secure convention center, safe from the everyday wilderness of LA’s filthy streets.
Outside, the hostile greetings of the signs had raised the spectres of art shows past, where once-proud bohemian individualist artists trotted meekly behind the tent-revival preachers of millenarian political correctness. Inside, some requisite social justice displays were erected to alleviate the quasi-religious guilt of the organizers and attendees. Tell the punters they are sinners, then reel them in to woke confession. Two evangelical installations elevated themselves from the mass, one by merit, the other by scale and ugliness. The meritorious, JP Goncalves’ mosaics lit under timed lights were beautiful, if overwhelmed by preachy didactic signage. Light was his clever painterly tool to reveal and conceal the shadowy faces of foster care children hidden on individually angled mosaic tiles. The big ugly, a dystopian playhouse bunker made of polystyrene blocks ambitiously titled Memorial to the Future. A creased pink sign said it was “a historical link to the project of modernity and its aspirations while simultaneously reminding us of its perils and failures.” But like the brutal modernist architecture it referenced, the installation was surely destined for the dumpster (non-recyclable trash only). Build the alternative.
Inside, covid-panic had scared away the crowds, but adversity is the mother of truth, and the rows of white booths set hopefully against the tides of fear told some fine facts about the art market. This is true — an art fair is a marketplace of stalls selling things to people with enough disposable income to hang their money on their walls. This is true — an art fair is a sensual shopping spree for the self-conscious bourgeoisie, and the pulsing heart of art is luxury. This is true — social justice art is a show-me-more thong tied to barely cover the shaved fact of lush commerce.
Pastiche Picassos and guaranteed authentic Pollocks and social justice charity displays were out on the edges, tucked against cold concrete. Next, the shadowy booths of hopeful pump ‘n’ dump NFT sales teams smiling like sharp cyber-vampires who promised much, and delivered less, lit by shining vertical screens playing slick animations and smelling of sophisticated avarice. Video works best in the darkness. But the sparkly jet-set prey they longed for didn’t emerge because covid kept them mansion-bound, playing the computerized shell-game of NFT investment in cleanroom comfort.
Next, the mirror sculptures and expensive, shiny and superficial things to entertain. Only scale distinguished them from end-of the-pier mementos bought by children then lost in the bottom of a box in the attic.
Shai Kremer, Concrete Abstract #13, World Trade Center, 2001- 2012, 2013
Closing in toward the center, conceptual photographer Shai Kremer showed detailed photo-collages of the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, moving, and cleverly composed, haunted by the ghosts of 9/11 sunk in the mysterious softness of age. New psychedelia was well represented by Mirus Gallery, especially with David Choong Lee’s Chakra paintings, wobbling in the weird interface between modernist abstraction and high hallucination. Cinq showed an eerie Reunion Clandestina by Juan Luis Jardi, placing Leonora Carrington’s spooky surrealism in an urban wasteland, and Rebecca Hossack showed Laurence Jones’ Pool with Orange Float, a deceptive sunset over lighted blueness.
David Choong Lee, Chakra 8, Oil, acrylic paint, latex paint, aerosol paint, 24 x 30
In the booths at the core of the show, in the solid heart of the marketplace where the real work is always done, the efficient staffs of RJD, Arcadia, Abend, Copro and Rehs worked hard, selling the real thing to people who love art for the pleasure it brings, and the sanctuary it offers. Strong, sturdy, and reliable. Ever-charming Steve Diamant displayed his exquisite taste in his Arcadia booth, where Lo Chan Peng’s portrait of a steampunk Plague Doctor hung heavy on a cast concrete slab, and Alberto Ortega’s eye over suburbia hovered above dioramas built in his studio and precisely painted — his Revelation floating above an idealized American neighborhood, asking more questions than it answered. Mary Jane Ansell showed how to be England’s finest figurative painter with three small jewels of works, including her gorgeous Study for Cri de Coeur, and Adele Flamand-Brown’s Good Fences Make Good Neighbors was a virtuoso, if conventional piece of pencil drawing.
Mary-Jane Ansell, Libery Call II, Oil on Aluminum, 21 x 21
At Rehs, lovely liquid skies by Brian Sostrom stirred the simplicity of abstraction with the subtlety of tonalism. Rob Rey’s Bioluminescence was a hot hint of emerging Psy-fi, with Mia Bergeron’s Apparition on the dark side of DNA mutation and biological horror. Vanesa Lemen dipped her toes into some delicious psychedelic abstraction, and Mitsuru Watanabe took a trip into the pop-surreal with his Kaoko Visiting Bosch’s Hell and an odd St. George riding a rhino.
Mitsuru Watanabe, Naoko Visiting Bosch's Hell, Oil on canvas on board, 63 3/4 x 38 1/4
Copro flew the freak flag of lowbrow highest with an impressive selection of their inventory, and starred Carl Dobsky’s gothic centerpiece, Weight of Small Things, with self-indulgent diners talking while disregarding circling hyenas, reminding us that narcissism ends in destruction, that ethics are available to all media, including representation, and that long didactic messaging adds nothing to a fine painting planned carefully and crafted impressively. Reality is already cruel enough without endlessly positioning art as the tool of quasi-religious propagandists.
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