A Selection of Sensuous Affection
'Eden's Edge' telescopes L.A.'s conflicted psyche but celebrates its soul
Does any city appear more often in art exhibition titles than Los Angeles? Nationally and internationally, there seems no end to shows - let alone special issues of art magazines - geographically defining the variety of work made here. Ironically, while calling L.A. art by name promotes and validates the local scene, it simultaneously - deliberately, some insist - undercuts it: Will art created in L.A. ever be known as exceptionally diverse and therefore resistant to easy categorization? Will quality works from our city ever be seen as something other than one big brand or, worse, a fad?
Eden's Edge: Fifteen L.A. Artists is the fourth L.A. art biennial at the Hammer Museum, which has become one of our most invigorating art institutions. The exhibition is the first solo project of Gary Garrels, recently appointed chief curator. Now at the Hammer just less than two years, he began designing the show while still holding an esteemed position at the Museum of Modern Art. A New Yorker? Curating a show for L.A., about L.A., before even living here? On the surface it all sounds rather pompous.
Fortunately, surface and facile classifications are not what Garrels is about. Neither, consequently, is Eden's Edge. In a truly affectionate selection of works, he digs deep into the vast trove of possibilities and emerges with art that remarks upon L.A.'s enduring dark myths and confounding ambiguities. That might not sound new, but the brilliance you see is grace shining through.
Introducing the show to a crowd of reporters, Garrels clarified that Eden's Edge does not seek to codify the present state of L.A. art. Rather, these 15 artists - who range in age and years of practice - are creating work that reflects common themes currently relevant to the city itself. They each, Garrels writes in the exhibition catalog, "track a persistent consciousness of the contradictions endemic to life in Los Angeles, and more broadly to contemporary American culture." Moreover, these artists' works mirror very real and tumultuous environmental conditions that parallel social ones, including a "sense of the possibility of unexpected change, of states of consciousness that break and fold into one another." The language of many of these artists' published critiques provided his initial compass, Garrels says - descriptions of art that were "richly associative, bristling, filled with unresolved concatenations" of tension, instability, and extreme visceral qualities.
Knowing this, you feel - fittingly - both dared and courted to enter the show. Garrels eases us into it, however, by generously giving each artist an individual gallery. It's a winning move, allowing for full concentration on each body of work. In fact, if your experience is like mine, there's a moment in every room when the creations surrounding you start to slink under your skin, consuming you as you consume them.
This may also be because the L.A. that unfolds at Eden's Edge is a highly sensual one - most colors are deep, most textures are palpable, and many shapes are sexual. In addition, since all the artists are deeply engaged with craft, their hand-work, regardless of materials, keeps the makers present in the rooms and their pieces trembling with energy.
Arranged roughly by the number of years each artist has practiced, the show begins with Ken Price, whose voluptuous, twinkling ceramics reach out and melt back on themselves like sturdy sea anemones. Lari Pittman's open canvases come next, at once apocalyptic and regenerative, simultaneously collapsing and exploding, constantly blooming despite imagery that is deathly or disgusting (men defecating and retching, for example). If you've never seen a Pittman canvas in person, prepare to be astounded. Then, turn the first corner and you're in Jim Shaw's dreams - sleep-inspired, often macabre paintings resembling pulp-fiction paperback covers.
Mark Bradford addresses the shifting social and cultural terrain of L.A. with his massive aerial-view map collages that look to be eating their own flesh. Rebecca Morales, however, presents the eeriest of the lot: Her gouache and watercolor explorations of natural forms (hair, grass, flowers) on calf vellum are so precise you think you see them quiver.
Eden's Edge crawls in murky shadows - pornography (Matt Greene's layered paintings, Elliott Hundley's delicate dioramas) and sexual deviance (Monica Majoli's watercolor Rubbermen) also emerge - but, as befits the show's heart of contradictions, it's full of easy smiles, too. Shaw's enormous Dream Object (By the garage was a big dripping Ganesha statue made of foam with phallic drips coming from the breasts and for a head...) (2001) startles and makes you laugh out loud; Liz Craft's 2002 life-size bronze motorcycle-riding skeleton Death Rider (Virgo) is hilarious in itself, but her mellow Ballad of the Hippie (2003) and grouping of small, mammary mountains - "Mountain Mamas," Garrels called them - give you time to exhale. And Harriet "Harry" Dodge and Stanya Kahn's video Masters of None (2006) is deliriously funny. (I won't give it away.)
Eden's Edge ends with a 2004 piece by the late Jason Rhoades, a miraculous chandelier composed of wagon wheels, countless electrical cords, and dangling neon signs of slang words for vagina. It's a creation of madness - of total excess and effulgence - that takes up the entire room, and even though the illumination was steady, I could swear the thing was flickering and sparking. Vegetable phalluses perched above the neon match a crude sculptural element on the floor as you enter - an aggregate of materials that includes an erect cucumber penis humbled by the "light" of the awesome pussy rain.
It could be a cliché to leave the show on this debauched note, but it's difficult to deny the inherent logic: The presentation reads as a eulogy to Rhoades, as well as a symbol of tragic decadence. But Rhoades's high-wire act also completes a picture that began with Price's organic ceramics, especially Optimist (1999), the oldest piece in the show, which bears upward "flames" of reddish brown hues. It too suggests death, maybe even hell, but it's still dazzling and exuberant. In other words, at Eden's Edge, we see a curatorial labor - as well as a Los Angeles - brimming with love. And love always wants to live.
Published: 06/07/2007
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