Editor's Life Unedited

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Frenzy
I have quite a few projects going on right now. My New Year's resolution was to prioritize projects based on which ones made me money. But that isn't necessarily what I end up enjoying. But I do like the way this recession is shaping up. It seems pretty equal opportunity. I moved to the ghetto for this type of fiscal rainy day.

I need to curate four Art shows in the next two months. Anyone know any good artists? I know quite a few but I never take notes and I can easily recall the great great ones but I just space out on all fo the really good ones. I call it Artzheimers. It is an affliction of curators.

Eugenia Butler 1947 - 2008
Artist Eugenia Butler died over the weekend from what I was told was a stroke.

Eugenia was a neighbor of mine at the Brewery Art Colony for many years. She was supportive of my projects over the years (especially early on, when it meant the world) and once gave me a ride to the airport (a big deal in L.A.).

She had a reputation as a high-maintenance personality and there are a lot of great stories about that side of her, but she had a compassionate side too - and I think it was borne out of her experiencing the 1960s cultural shifts while she was developmentally able to comprehend what was going on as she was going along with it (a perk of being an early baby boomer, but manifest expressly in her personality and the hopeful, probing side of her art).

Her art was quite heady at times, and ever the Aquarius, she loved grouping people together for projects like The Kitchen Table and The Book of Lies. I most liked her small paintings illustrating sound that appeared to be minimal contrasts of stark color and simple line drawings that were elegant and involved. She was prolific - especially for a conceptual artist - and never afraid to try new things. I included her in a survey of artists from the Brewery that I curated in 2001 for Shasta College in Redding up in Northern California.

The last time I spoke to her was right after Allan Kaprow had died, we had a long discussion, and over this past weekend I went to the Allan Kaprow retrospective at MOCA and thought of Eugenia, how she was a part of the tradition Kaprow had berthed, how she would not have allowed MOCA to dare put on such a piss poor rambling bullshit tribute to an important artist and then I wondered how she was doing as my thoughts wandered through the show... she was already gone and I didn't even know it.

Out of respect I just can't find it in me to relay here one of many stories of how OUT THERE she was in her fearless confrontation with anyone on any subject at any time, but she was a legend among the personalities of the art world.

I found someone's YOUTUBE video of her... the best part is her laugh...

LACMA Fucked
The LA Times reports that the geniuses at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art issued bonds to pay for their glorious expansion (homage to their egos) and now due to financial turmoil, they are stuck paying ridiculously inflated rates to bondholders.

L I N K -to- S T O R Y

All I gotta say is those people - the top art institutional administrators - they are just not as smart as their titles, positions and attitudes all imply. And is costing LACMA (actually, we the people) millions.

L.A. ArtScene Podcast
Just posted on ArtScene Visual Radio is the February edition of The Mat Gleason Seven.

This month's show features reviews of SOME PAINTINGS at Track 16 Gallery, solo shows by Oliver Arms at Western Projects and Mark DiSuvero at L.A. Louver, an examination of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the scandals around the non-donation of Broad's art collection to LACMA and, finally, a discussion of the phenomena of juried group shows for emerging artists. Listen at the link above.

Baird Jones - RIP
I am still in shock and deep sadness over news of the death of Coagula New York Editor BAIRD JONES. This man gave our publication enthusiastic support and validation for most of the past 9 years. He would have enjoyed his NY TIMES obituary.

Baird Jones with artist Victoria Gotti at her debut solo show that he curated.

I will write more about Baird over the next few days and probably publish some of it...

Julian Schnabel Pre-Oscar Art Show at Gagosian
Pictures of the bash at COAGULA DOT COM

There was a happy celebrity-peppered elbowing crowd at Gagosian on Thursday night for the opening of Julian Schnabel's show of oversized lush earth-colored paintings of bones (which had been used in the credit shots of his latest academy award nominated film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). Schnabel, the Director, posed with Larry Gagosian and then wandered through the gallery taking with friends and well-wishers.

He backed up into into a small side-gallery where three absurd new compositions of his featured cotton balls stuck onto faded red velvet framed in plastic replicas of oak frames ornamented with acorns. He made it in in just as our Coagula photographer was shooting the objects saying "Ridiculous!" L.A. gallerist Andy Schwartz discreetly let us know “He's right behind you.”
We then asked the maestro about his cotton picking art.

Coagula: So how did you make this piece?
Schnabel: It took me 20 years to do it.
Coagula:??
Schnabel: I had that red piece of velvet for 20 years, and last week, I stuck the cotton balls on it... Took me 20 years to do it.
Coagula: And the frames?
Schnabel: I had them.
Coagula: Does the cotton evoke anything in particular for you?
Schnabel: What?
Coagula: Does the cotton signify anything, say fragility, temporariness...
Schnabel: It's just cotton. No bunny rabits. It's just what you see. Cotton.
Coagula: Fuck you.

Over whose eyes do you think you are pulling the wool, Dude?!?!? Fortunately, Schnabel is spending more time making movies and really good ones. He told writer Stephanie DuTan that he is working on the next one already. He obviously doesn't have cash problems. Tragically, most of these truly terrible works had sold before the opening.

REVIEW: Broad Contemporary Art Museum
Pictures of the new BCAM at the Coagula Dot Com site.

ELI'S COMIN'

The Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM)is the big play by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to stay in the major leagues. As a blue-chip warehouse of ArtForum’s finest from the past 5 decades, it succeeds. But even more than an art museum, this new institution is as explosively a patriotic surge of Americana as exists in the art world.

In an art world that has always genuflected toward Europe (in the abstract, with no central allegiance beyond the archetype of old world elitism and snobbish elegance), The BCAM is the ugly, rich American telling the world ”this is how you fuckin’ do it, dude!” in a raging cowboy abandonment of the refined good taste and philanthropic generosity that has heretofore defined institutional culture. Architect Renzo Piano has lined up a series of repeating red stripes (with the white negative space of So.Cal) that screams out to be read as the starless part of the American flag. Jasper Johns’ flag paintings have never seen particularly political, but around the corner from a 1963 Robert Rauschenberg painting of John F. Kennedy and a floor below Andy Warhol’s Jacki O, Elvis and Marylin, they triumphantly announce the American cultures victory over good taste and one man’s investment in that triumph.

the low-lights of our self-induced vacuity abound at this palace of redneck chic:

• A half-acre sized room of Jeff Koons pastiching the ugliest banalities that this culture has produced into monumental agitations of market economics is the surreal investment banker wet dream made manifest.
• Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger form a feminist Macbethian triumvirate that screams quota, while a room of amazing Basquiats is so out of place with Broad’s anal/machine aesthetic that it holla tokenism.
• The Leon Golub room next to Jean-Michel’s trove reveals the guilty white liberal soul of the art world and an 80s room of Bleckner, Taffe, Salle, Fischl, Schnabel and Tansey the remorse of every bad investment made in the land of plenty.
• Brit Damien Hirst seems quite at home with Broad serving as Ed Sullivanesque validator to this self-impressed contemporary Beatle-like exotic oddity.
• Ex-pat Cy Twombly looks out of place near Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein and Ed Ruscha until one compares the auction results of the aging masters.
• A first-floor Richard Serra installation is the big and bold ‘meerukan type vision that gives places like Texas its ego, with all the funhouse excitement of a county fair as it winds its way a few feet from Wilshire Boulevard.

The BCAM hardly seems to be here for Los Angeles. It features few local artists, and with its 1980s sensibilities, no contemporary artists. The BCAM exists for cultural tourists from abroad. It is a Disneyland-like attraction for European and Asian tourists. This museum gives them the chance to see the real America while simultaneously feeding the fine art urge that defines cultural tourism and the weak dollar it so loves. This is the real America of lip-service-liberalism, superficial philosophers, icons of fame and filth, big brash bold banalities and restrooms so clean you could eat your breakfast off their floors. If the security guards carried loaded pistols and the parking lot had traffic signals it would be the only place anyone ever needed to visit to comprehend the greatness, glory and ignorant grandeur of the United States of America.

OC Arts Impressario Mike McGee in Need of Kidney Donor

Mike McGee (R) with Mat Gleason at Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, California, June 2006.

From: "Andrea Harris" aharris @ exchange. Fullerton . edu

Dear Mat,

I just wanted share the following update with you. I am not sure if you knew this but Mike has kidney failure from a genetic disease called polycystic kidney disease. He has been fighting it for some time and his condition is getting worse. We are looking to all our friends to spread the word about Mike and our search for a kidney donor.

Mike has found it difficult to believe this is all happening to him. He is such a healthy person that it has been just unimaginable to see this disease progress. But it is happening and I am trying to get the word out to help him.

If you know anyone who is and O blood type or A type 2 (only 20% of A's are type 2) who would be interested in helping Mike by donating a kidney to him please get in touch. We need to find a living donor for him in the next few months. He starts dialysis at Saint Josephs Hospital in two months and we hope he will not be on this very long. His doctors have told us he will only make it with a living donor with a compatible blood type. Mike is O.

I have already been tested and was not compatible. We have three other friends who are being tested in the next week. We are keeping our hopes up that someone comes forward and is a match for him. This is a gift of life for him.

Pass this around and thank you for your help. You can direct people who might be interested in helping Mike to me as I can send information on getting tested as a potential donor.

All the best, Andrea
(71 4) 812-6 678

Portrait of the Artist as the Gallerist

The beautiful, stylish LEORA LUTZ at her Gallery Revisted Fourth Anniversary exhibition

Wow-oh-wow... I thought I was an art world-navigator, but the premise of this show takes the cake.

"Artist/Gallerist"
Friday, Feb. 1st, 7pm - 10pm at Another Year In L.A. Gallery

It should be an awesome networking orgy of a show and this gallery is pretty comfortable with the pourings at openings so all of the local dealers should be in a libacious mood!

This invitational group show features work by a selection of artists who also happen to own some of the most innovative galleries in Los Angeles. Another Year in L.A. Gallery is on San Fernando Road near the border of Glendale and Mt. Washington in a very cool historic building that was the First Capitol Records pressing plant and distribution center.

The Artists include:
Nena Amsler (HAUS Gallery)
Lara Bank (Sea and Space Explorations)
Elizabeta Betinski (OVERTONES Gallery)
Fette (Fette's Gallery)
Ian Hunter (Shotgun Space)
John Knuth (Circus Gallery)
Leora Lutz (Gallery Revisited)
John Matowsky (DRKRM)
Jeanne Patterson (Domestic Setting)
William Rabe (HAUS Gallery)
Star Rosencrans (Shotgun Space)
Michael Smoler (High Energy Constructs)
Cathy Stone (another year in LA)

Bruce Licher @ Dangerous Curve

We went to Dangerous Curve on Saturday for the Bruce Licher retrospective. This is a fantastic show of a great designer. So it got me thinking, you see, because Licher established a reputation in design and yet – as this show displays - is so much an artist.

I thought of him, there surrounded by his ouvre, and his most street-cred accomplishment – a founder of the band Savage Republic (as important an industrial band as the West Coast has produced) -- and I thought of another designer – Shepard Fairey – whose purpose in life has been to simulate street credibility by punk placement of his posters. Bruce Licher’s survey show was a small, respectful, beautiful show of the letterpress masterpieces of this artistic force of nature who has more punk and street in his pinkie than all the media celebutantes drizzling their cartoon bullshit nothings onto city walls in the desperate attempt to market themselves into a cool corporate niche will ever have.

I didn’t talk to Bruce about these notions, was just happy to shake his hand, chat for a while with his wife Karen, an artist in her own right, and buy one of the few remaining prints from his once-endless trove. I wore a Savage Republic teeshirt in the 80s until the thing was 7 threads held together by the shirt tag and the crusty silkscreen ink remnants, so I didn’t yearn for an extended conversation, it had all been said, in letterpress and noise a lifetime ago and just yesterday.

Art L.A. 2008

Dealer Kim Light presenting a painting grid on paper by artist Kim Dingle at ArtLA 2008 at the Santa Monica Civic

We went to the Art Fair at the Santa Monica Civic on Friday.

Each year the vibe in ArtLA is different, but the aesthetic shared by the art fair participants remains forever firmly entrenched in the "Duchampian Abortion" genre. Unlike in fairs past, the commitment to even an anti-aesthetic is hardly present in the face of so, so many small prints and drawings in the comfortable $400-$900 range.

This edition of the fair was about selling out... and cheap. The occasional good artwork was lost in a sea of thirtysomething slacker artists overhung by fortysomething trust-fund art dealers already looking nervous and desperate to cover their nut spent on securing a booth for this attempt at gravity in such terribly unserious times.

Thank god for Lizabeth Olveira and Kim Light, each who had the decency to present a booth that displayed art by an artist instead of product by a passing trend. Perhaps the security of a Culver City lease in the shadow of Tim Blum's mullet gives them the confidence that every other ball-less depARTment Store at this fair lacked.

Highlight of the fair, though, was a Randall Scott sighting, 14 years after his TBA gallery here closed and before he became a Washington DC contemporary art dealing hotshot.

ART FAIR: 2008 Los Angeles Art Show

Daniel Foster and Peter Frank at the Gallery C booth at the Los Angeles Art Show, 1-23-08

Art Fairs are a culture of their own, almost an art world within an art world. The Los Angeles Art Show’s grand opening Wednesday night obviously suffered from a drenching downpour. Attendance for the opening shindig was considerably smaller than last year’s opening night and the sales were paltry. People clamored about the feedbag, and it was a good one of free restaurant grub – fresh shucked oysters, for example, were a big highlight.

Celebrity sightings: William Shatner and his wife were accompanied by two queenie designer types who talked him out of everything he liked. Owen Wilson gawked at stuff like one would imagine a stoner/actor type to go “Wow, trippy...”.

A number of galleries were furious when a pleasant, if lackluster evening, was broken into with screaming audio of some maniac asking everyone to shush – it turns out that a small, amateurish “awards ceremony” by Art and Living magazine was piped in over the sound system at ridiculously loud levels. Some knucklehead is yammering on and on about museum awards he is giving out – of course, Michael Govan and Connie Butler (to name some names he “awarded” in name-dropping pride) none of them are even there to pickup the awards, but Mister Flapjaw keeps it up. So I am trying to discuss a real estate deal with a Culver City bigwig and a gallery director next to me is trying to sell a painting – the Jerkoff who cannot get anyone to attend his award ceremony and pick up their awards just talks nonstop and my contact bolts at the same time the collector strays too far amidst the needless clamor. Wow, whoever gave this amateur a microphone to totally ruin what was already a shaky night out... man oh man, get it together, if you are small potatoes, don’t jump up and amplify your screaming about this pathetic fact.

THE 6 PM SCRAMBLE TO FIX LEAKY ART FAIR TENT ROOFS IS UNDERWAY: