reviews eden’s edge
eden’s edge: FiFteen LA Artists
Ha m m er museum, Los angeLes
13 m ay – 2 septem ber
left: Liz Craft,
Death Rider (Virgo), 2002,
bronze, 142 x 274 x 366 cm.
photo: Joshua White.
Collection dean Valentine
and amy adelson, Los angeles.
Courtesy marianne boesky
gallery, new york
facing page: Lari pittman,
Untitled, 2003, acrylic,
oil and aerosol lacquer
on gessoed canvas over
wood panel, 259 x 193 cm.
photo: Joshua White.
Collection eileen Harris
norton, santa monica.
Courtesy regen projects,
Los angeles
Let’s recap what’s been done to Los Angeles art during the past 15 years. given the glut of biennial train wrecks, the clarity was bracing – respectful of
In 1992, MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel, the consummate insider, the art and, better yet, of the audience. It also reinforces why young artists
ignited the emerging scene with Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s, his will always need room to develop. All of these things are signs of maturity.
mostly dead-on forecast of bigger things to come. Despite invoking Charles This, of course, is the main reason why Ken Price’s ceramic sculptures
Manson, Schimmel’s show obliterated the past while making it impossible to seem – even in the first room, and as compact as they are – as if they
ignore the city any longer. Five years later Lars Nittve had the nerve to put up could devour the entire show. His perfectly titled Go-No-Go (2006) is as
Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A. 1960–1997 in Denmark, accompanied by some grotesque as it is gorgeous, as abstract as it is figurative and as fake as it is
who-does-he-think-he-is? mutterings among Angelenos. (I contributed natural. Its ability to just plainly be these things is an object lesson for some
to Nittve’s catalogue, also, I suppose, as an outsider, because at that point of the kids to come, for example Liz Craft’s weighted-down ‘hippie’ bronzes,
I’d only put in three years.) In the decade since Nittve’s survey, the LA art Matt Greene’s thin paintings of mushrooms and/or the female body, and
scene has grown in both size and substance, as more players have made it Rebecca Morales’s fussy drawings of botanical materials. Only Lari Pittman
less possible for anyone to claim custodial rights. Case in point: there was far really holds his own here next to Price. Pittman’s most recent paintings (for
less comment last year when Catherine Grenier left out the last 20 years and example, Untitled, 2006) are among the best he has ever made, not least for
organised a more purely historical survey of LA art, Los Angeles 1955–1985, the manner in which they return to the ‘grit’ of his mid-1980s work without
at the Pompidou. (Indeed, LA art has a history that goes back much further.) looking homesick for the ‘sweet neglect’ that he used to say was a good thing
LA art is here to stay — barring the disaster that is always around the corner. for LA.
History may conclude that Eden’s Edge, Gary Garrels’s insightful Pittman’s contemporary Jim Shaw’s work completes the triumvirate
if necessarily uneven attempt to survey LA art from within, closes out a of influence that keeps Garrels’s show on solid yet deliberately unstable
dramatic chapter in its success story, one that began with Helter Skelter. ground. And while the extent to which it appears as if these two artists, each
Willing to take another look at one of the most pervasive myths about LA 17 years younger than Price, seem to have had an impact upon everything
– as heaven and hell rolled up into one – he has put together a coherent else in the show, it doesn’t stop the strongest among them from staking their
exhibition that still allows the contradictions to emerge. The show has it both own claims. The intensity of Sharon Ellis’s truly visionary paintings and the
ways: as a survey exhibition and a roundup of emerging work. Before seeing psychologically condensed complexities of Matthew Monahan’s totemic
it, I’d heard some grumbling about Garrels’s decision to give each of the 15 sculptures revel in their contradictions as ably as anyone else in the legitimate
artists his or her own room, arranging them in the approximate descending heaven-and-hell of this town – which, as it continues to grow up, none of us,
order of the number of years they had been making work. For me, however, Garrels included, need any longer deny. Terry R. Myers
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