Pacific Standard Time: The Gallery Scene

ANOTHER bit of catching up here: My latest article concerns the art galleries that made Los Angeles an important center for contemporary art in the years before the LACMA opened. I looked primarily at three gallery owners -- Irving Blum of Ferus, Virginia Dwan and Riko Mizuno.

The late, great Wallace Berman

HERE is the story, which due to the Times' layout looks like it is almost entirely a correction. (It's not.)

It's notable, of course, that two of these key figures were women, especially given how macho the LA art world was in the first few postwar decades. (Ferus included.) Here is a page about a show at Crossroads School about woman gallerists in the '60s and '70s.

Some of these themes will be part of a West Hollywood branch of Pacific Standard Time called It All Started Here.

Comics From India

THIS is the kind of high/low, east/west, pop/myth collision i love: a new exhibit at the LACMA called "heroes and villains: the battle for good in india's comics." though the title evokes the beach boys, the show is more about devi, vishnu and other hindu gods and the way they return, through the magic of pop culture, in indian comic books.

here is my story from this sunday's LATimes. i spoke to the show's lead curator, julie romain (who used to assist the LACMA's brilliant and notorious paul holdengraber with his memorable series) and the indian scholar debashish banerji.

both of them framed the context against india's disaspora, globalism and tranformation by western pop. i'll return for a more considered look at this show, which includes a tour through the museum's subsantial south/southeast asian art collection.

Photo Credit: LACMA

Salman Rushdie vs. Los Angeles

WHEN i agreed to hang out with novelist salman rushdie in and around hollywood for a few hours, i would not have been surprised to find myself embroiled in a discussion about george harrison's facility for the sitar, or to be shown the very drugstore where an acid-tripping aldous huxley encountered "the doors of perception." but i did not expect to get into a hilarious story about "starsky and hutch."

that's part of what i like about reading rushdie as well -- you never quite know where his work is going to swerve, but most of the time his excursions reinforce rather than undercut his literary personality. here is that piece, by the way, which is about the most fun i've had on a literary story. and i am very glad neither of us got shot, which looked for a minute like it was about to happen.

a few days ago i visited a new exhibit at the los angeles county museum of art dedicated to comics from india -- more on that in a future post. but the show made me think of rushdie and his wild mixing of ancient and pop-contemporary, especially in books like "midnight's children" (a book i read in a kind of fever it was so good) and his last novel "the enchantress of florence."

these days, i hear from his publicist, rushdie is completing a new novel and the script to a "midnight's children" film. since his books -- as he discusses in our interview -- were so profoundly effected by movies, especially bollywood and "the wizard of oz" -- this project could appealingly close the circle.

Postwar German Art, Mexican Printmaking and LACMA

The other day i made my first concentrated trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in a very long time. in the last year or two i'd walked along the campus with architect renzo piano as he talked about upcoming renovations, and i attended the blowout opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, but this was my first visit as as civilian in quite a while. it also may be that only time i've been to lacma ever and wished i had more time to take in what was available. even with a big gallery closed off for installation there was plenty to see.

first stop was the latin-american art collection. this will be old news for some, but cuban-born sculptor's jorge pardo's redesign of the pre-columbian galleries is smartly and crisply modern; that collection has never looked so good. (tho in the contemporary department, probably a bit heavily weighed with work by francis alys.) my favorite of the 20th century latin am art was the prints/woodcuts of the TGP, or People's Print Workshops, a post-revolutionary group begun in 1937. very fine batch of postwar abstraction by artists like joaquin torres-garcia and carlos merida.

museum trips in college brought me to a love of german expressionism, where urban scenes were reframed on a fractured or shattered plane -- to me this was more urgent than most of the genteel-seeming french work i was seeing at the time. my love of german art took me to the "art of two germanys: cold war cultures" show, the first exhibit to be set up in the new BCAM. 

(here is christopher knight's LAT review, and here is the NYT calling the show "a coup for this california institution.")

far too much to say about this very powerful show here, but i'll mention, first, that werner heldt is a painter and draughtsman i hadnt known who embodies everything i like about german art. 

second, sigmar polke and gerhard richter's  "capitalist realism" -- austere germany, after decades of poverty, hitler and war, got hit so hard so fast by consumerism in the '50s that its artists came up with some of the sharpest critiques -- is especially well represented. richter's famous "uncle rudi" is there, and some of his abstractions.

as i said, so much to see i'll have to go back soon.

Photo credit: LACMA and Public domain