Go West

If French art appears to be little known in the US in general and on the West Coast in particular, then the reverse is also true. Few French artists or curators can claim even a nodding acquaintance with the artistic situation in this part of the States. Usually, they will only know the Los Angeles scene, as a result of Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy’s impact in Europe and through the exhibitions Helter Skelter at MOCA, Los Angeles, and Sunshine & Noir, shown at the Louisiana Museet in Denmark before touring Europe and finally going to the Armand Hammer in L.A. Until recently, the French art world was obsessed with New York and, to some extent, San Francisco which, rightly or wrongly, it perceived as "more European." Los Angeles was ignored, associated with Hollywood and the decadence of Western Culture, while smaller towns such as San Diego, Portland and Seattle drew a blank (except, that is, for the association of Seattle with Kurt Cobain and grunge). There have been no real studies or books showing the developing of art in California generally or in Los Angeles in particular. Not many people remember that Artforum was founded on the West Coast in the early ’60s and that the area threw up a whole series of "funky" artists such as Bruce Conner and Ed Kienholz. Not many people know the work of Wallace Berman or, more recently, have heard of the performances of the ’70s by the Kipper Kids, or Bob and Bob. Many fine artists such as Mitchell Syrop are relatively unknown, not to mention the post Kelley/McCarthy and post Pardo/Rhoades generations, people like Dave Muller, Suzie Parker, Won Ju Lim, Jeff Burton and Catherine Sullivan who, of course, are quite unknown in France. But is there really such a thing as a "West Coast phenomenon"? The term is something of a misnomer. For one thing, most of the artists are relatively isolated in their respective towns and do not necessarily have sustained relations (Catherine Opie, for example, is the only name that comes to mind when one thinks of exchanges between San Francisco and Los Angeles). For another, the fact of living in the same region provides only a very basic common denominator. Indeed, if we are really set on finding an artistic unity on the American West Coast, then Los Angeles is the place to go.

 

We Don’t Want No Education

This is one city that can be said to have a genuine art scene. It is the home of four of the country’s top art schools: the art faculty of UCLA, directed by Mary Kelly and with a teaching body including Charles Ray, Paul McCarthy, Lari Pittman, etc.; the Art Center College of Design, directed by Richard Hertz, with Mike Kelley, Liz Larner, Stephen Prina, Jim Shaw and Christopher Williams; Cal Arts, the best known, although it has been slipping somewhat of late; and Otis, something of an outsider, but a place whose ranks of undergraduate students often move on to the graduate studies departments of the other schools. There is intense competition among these schools to attract the best students. All offer teaching positions for artists, as do other bodies such as community colleges or the University of California establishments at Santa Barbara, Irvine and San Diego, not to mention the University of Southern California.

 

Maps of the Words

There are large numbers of exhibition spaces in Los Angeles, some of which are involved in "Côte Ouest." The best known contemporary art institutions are, of course, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and its satellite space, the Geffen, UCLA at the Armand Hammer (which also shows more classic exhibits) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art (LACMA), which extends to good contemporary shows. While the bequest of its late founder limits the Getty to art before 1900, its department heads try to find a way around this by commissioning artists to decorate the spaces or by organizing specialist exhibitions in the research department. One example of this is Anne and Patrick Poirier’s intervention for Côte Ouest. The more alternative spaces include the Santa Monica Museum of Art at Bergamot Station (which, as its name does not indicate, has no permanent collection), LACE in Hollywood, a historic space that used to be artist-run (this is where Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy came to prominence), and POST, a huge downtown private space in a no-man’s-land area which has recently acquired a more traditional gallery near the LACMA, a stone’s throw from the complex that includes the ACME, Dan Bernier and Brian Butler galleries, among others. Then there are galleries located at various strategic points around town: Patrick Painter and Rosamund Felsen, among others, at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, or the edgy galleries in West Hollywood such as Regen Projects, Margo Leavin or Richard Telles, and then the new developments in Chinatown with the New China Art Objects gallery. There are also a number of events such as the Three Day Weekends organized by Dave Muller, the exhibitions at the Brewery and those put on by the independent curators Sarah Gavlak and Sue Spaid, not to mention While U Wait, a series of shows at the DMV in Hollywood.

Money Money Should Be Funny In A Rich Man's World

It is this diversity of venues, together with the permanent mixing of students from all over the country, that gives Los Angeles its artistic vitality. This is compounded by two economic factors of not inconsiderable importance: rents here are relatively low, which means that many artists decide to stay on in California after the end of their studies, and the movie industry is a source of well-paid jobs that are more or less impossible to find elsewhere and enable students to reimburse the very high tuition fees charged by the art schools. Many young artists consequently spend part of their time working for the animation studios (for example, the South Park movie boasts the work of the young artists Roger Dickes, Andy Alexander and Cynthia Philipps) so as to subsidize their own artistic production. Built on the foundations of the Chouinard Institute, and in part financed by Walt Disney and his heirs, Cal Arts traditionally provides the latter’s studios with draftsmen, and many of its alumni of the early ’80s (Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Larry Johnson et al) did stints in the movie or animation industries.

Welcome to the Pleasure Dome

There a number of reasons to explain the popularity of Angeleno artists in Europe. The city’s art scene is characterized by its heterogeneity, the absence of dominant currents or movements. Artists assemble by affinity, almost on a family model, as reflected in the title of the exhibition in Austria, The Kelly Family. The "family" has prominent father figures, especially the conceptual artists John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler and Michael Asher, who taught at Cal Arts during the ’70s and ’80s and who influenced a whole generation of artists, many of whom themselves teach at the Art Center College of Design (Mike Kelley, Steve Prina, Jim Shaw, Liz Larner, Christopher Williams, Larry Johnson, et al) where their students include a larger quotient of women artists such as Sharon Lockhart, Diana Thater, Jessica Bronson, Pae White and Jennifer Steinkampf, alongside Jorge Pardo, TJ Wilcox and promising newcomers like Won Ju Lim, Michelle Alperin, Donald Morgan or Andy Alexander, not forgetting Doug Aitken, who came up through the undergraduate program. The art schools are one of the key elements in the Los Angeles scene, much more than any aesthetic, ideological or theoretical ideas as such. To simplify, we can say that the first generation of alumni from Cal Arts and, more recently, the Art Center have been strongly influenced by critical theory, and in particular by what the Americans call "French theory," more so than by the history of contemporary art, and that those who come out of UCLA tend to be more concerned with the market: students there are encouraged to exhibit as soon as possible. In recent years UCLA has reorganized its art department around Mary Kelly and its teaching body now includes artists such as Chris Burden and Paul McCarthy from the Chouinard Institute. Of course, these two figures have had a considerable influence on performance. The field has indeed produced many important artists here, which is why Europeans often imagine California as the promised land of performance art. However, as Tim Martin has pointed out, most people here abandoned performance years ago. The lack of information on this subject means that the history of performance here is little known. Not many people are aware, for example, of Paul McCarthy’s debt to the Kipper Kids, or Mike Kelley’s towards Guy de Cointet, a French artist based in California who died at the beginning of the ’80s. Apart from these conceptual, theoretical and performance-related influences, we should remember that many of the artists who come from, live in or have lived in California are relative outsiders in relation to the current scene. No one nowadays would refer to the heritage of Sam Francis, and while there may be a remote kinship between the paintings of David Hockney and Kevin Appel, or Steven Criqui, we are talking in terms of faint echoes rather than overpowering similarities. As for the work of Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, James Turrell, Bill Viola and Ed Ruscha, it is certainly highly respected but it is difficult to find clear-cut cases of it influencing younger artists here. When it comes to painting, a dominant form in Los Angeles, the scene can be roughly divided into two camps: the heirs and clones of Lari Pittman, and makers of abstract work which, truth to tell, is inferior to Bertrand Lavier’s Walt Disney Productions pieces. This is mainly neo-decorative work by the like of Laura Owens, Monique Prieto and Ingrid Calame. To this we must add the recent revival of the full-length academic portrait whose best known exponent is Amy Adler. It is still hard to say whether this is an ironic gesture or a literal return to tradition. All this is going on in the splendid isolation typical of the LA art scene. For not only do local galleries show little contemporary work from abroad but, with the odd exception, they rarely venture outside their own state. Given traditional American isolationism, they are generally unfamiliar with the working of European art and its institutions.

Jesus, It’s Great, We’re All Europeans

Whereas the French scene is dominated by the institution, public involvement in the States has shrunk massively. Of course, there are still a number of municipal and regional structures, but they are mostly politically correct or "community-oriented," which means that their subsidies are granted for work that is more socially engaged than artistically driven and tends to be conceived for a precise community. In Los Angeles, for example, the Watts art center is run mainly for the African American community while Self-Help Graphics is mainly Latino. The only reasonably mixed structure is the Barnsdall Art Park, located in an old Frank Lloyd Wright villa in a part of Hollywood where there is more social and ethnic intermingling. However, dominantly social orientation or not, grants are generally fairly low and these institutions are therefore obliged to seek other sponsors. Hence the mixture of surprise and envy felt by those artists and professionals who are more au fait with the situation in Europe. These are usually people who have exhibited or worked with European institutions (Americans rarely think in terms of French, German, Danish or Belgian—just "European"). But while these Americans caught up in the business of fundraising and grant-seeking may show signs of jealousy towards their European cousins, this is usually tempered by a rather critical attitude towards the functioning of European institutions, which are accused of stinginess towards the artists, authors and curators who work for them, of not providing contracts and, insult to end all insults, of being utterly disorganized. The few French artists known to Californians are Annette Messager (especially since her show at the LACMA), Sophie Calle and, surprisingly enough, André Cadéré. In fact, because of American cultural isolationism and Europeans’ recent lack of interest in Los Angeles, the only foreign artists to make a name for themselves there tend to be those who have lived out West, as did Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen. In fact, if there is a foreign culture that means something in Angeleno artistic circles, it is Austria. This is due to the outstanding work of the government which has been financing the MAK for nearly twenty years now. Located in a house built by Schindler, this art center organizes residencies for Austrian artists and major exhibitions which are not exclusively Austrian (Gordon Matta-Clark and Martin Kippenberger). This outpost also regularly attracts gallerists from Austria to Los Angeles and it is they who were the main force behind the dissemination of Angeleno art in Europe in the ’80s. Only two French galleries have adopted similar policies: Praz-Delavallade, which shows a fair number of Californian artists such as Jim Shaw, Cameron Jamie and Jeffrey Vallance (its stand at the last FIAC art fair in Paris was devoted to Los Angeles photographers) and, more recently and to a lesser extent, Galerie Georges-Philippe Valois, which exhibits Paul McCarthy and Jason Rhoades, and has taken an interest in more established Angeleno figures. Is it possible that an operation such as "Côte Ouest" could help make French contemporary art better known in the USA, and topple a few of the two countries’ mutual assumptions? In an attempt to answer this question,

Synesthésie

will be getting reactions from the artists and curators involved in the operation all through the event, as well as those of American artists, curators, gallerists, art students and exhibition-goers on the West Coast.

 Noëllie Roussel