Dan Graham at MOCA: Above and Beyond

From Leap Into the Void

From Left: Ari Wiseman, Bennett Simpson, Chrissie Iles, Dan Graham, Paul McCarthy

Pop* His Religion

Dan Explains Renaissance Convex Mirror Perspective

In the current issue of The Nation, Barry Schwabsky reviews the Dumas show that recently left MOCA:

"...it would be misleading to say that representation, in the sense that was developed in the Renaissance and remained the standard for European painting until Modernism, has made a comeback. One no longer paints from life but from images; the problem is no longer how to reconstruct the visual effect of three-dimensional volumes in space on a two-dimensional surface but rather how to translate a relatively light and consumable image into one that is materially and psychologically much denser and more durable."

Something similar could be said of Graham and his three-dimensional work. Rather than the marble-made-flesh of Canova or Bernini, Graham presents us with denser and more durable forms of consumer goods: our homes, our music, and ourselves.

Dan Demonstrates Interactivity

Having grown up in a left coast version not dissimilar to Graham's New Jersey, I can see how the tract-home developer translates his two-dimensional blueprints into limited-edition multiples that Graham viewed on the train ride between his parent's home and Manhattan. Graham pointed out the architectural borrowing--bits of Cape Cod and Tudor, with porch lights fashioned after the lamps on horse-drawn carriages. It becomes quotation without articulation, like placing two noses on Mr. Potato Head, with an ear where the lips should be.

In Use: Graham's Girl's Make-Up Room 1998-2000

Like many a suburban teenager, the way out was through music, found in urban centers with vibrant club scenes. Graham draws connections between the transcendence of the mosh pit and the Shaker's ecstatic convulsions, with stops at Jerry Lee Lewis along the way. If you spend 90 minutes at the show, it's definitely worth spending an hour of that watching Graham's Rock My Religion in its entirety.

Amen to That: A Still from Graham's Rock My Religion 1982-84

It's worth noting that MTV debuted in New Jersey a year before RMR, which foreshadows American capitalism's expansion from selling homes and entertainment, to selling people themselves. Previous to MTV was Sight on Sound, a Warner Cable show that featured interactive Qube cable box that allowed viewers to vote for their favorite videos. Graham's Alteration to a Suburban House, 1978 can be read as a proposed real world precursor to MTV's Real World.

The Real World: Graham's Homes for America 1966-67

Graham's architectural works--the pavilions and models--at their best allow the viewer to view themselves being viewed, a conceit that has been exploited by Twitter, Facebook, and the Blog-O-Sphere, virtually drowning out Graham's message. Still, his consistent adherence to popular culture as a medium (through magazines, video, and public art commissions) points to Pop: not the ism that is capitalism's Pop Art, but the social critique of *Populism.

Viewer as Subject and Object: Viewing Myself Being Viewed (By Diane Calder)
Graham's Public Space/Two Audiences from the 1976 Venice Biennale

Dan Graham: Beyond is on view at MOCA Grand Avenue through May 25, 2009. It will open June 25, 2009 at the Whitney and October 31, 2009 at the Walker.

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Robert Storr's Third Way at LACMA's Two Germnys†

Life in Vence: Robert von Storr

Robert Storr spoke at LACMA as part of their ancillary events for the Two Germanys exhibit. Part of my interest in attending was due to Storr’s history as a curator at MOMA, dean at Yale, and more vividly, instigator of the most recent cluster-muck that was the 2007 Venice Biennale. His novella-rant in the pages of Artforum, refuting point-by-point the cadre of critics the magazine had report back from Europe briefly slowed down the art world, like an OCD accident on the side of the freeway. In his own introduction at LACMA he pointed out that he was the first American 'Volk' to curate the Bienalle, though it could also be said he was the second of America's 'Bevölkerung'.

Talking very quickly, he laid out the old saw of modernism—book ended by Cubism on one end and Pop at the other—shifted as war and economic fortunes moved the art world from Paris to New York. Storr rightly points out that the transformation from art that doesn’t look like anything to art that looks like any thing except art only tells part of the tale. The NY-Paris axis can be seen as propaganda of the Washington-Moscow axis. At the same time, post-war Ab-Ex painters (and some painters today) attempt to wiggle away from the political, seeing it as a lesser form of art because it serves an agenda. Storr points out that any attempt to create value-free art is also framing a political position.

The allies' division of Germany and Berlin into four sectors quickly became the false dichotomy of East/West and left/right. In reality, various streams of art were made on both sides of the wall, and made in the context of this shifting political backdrop. In both Germanys, photographers were creating social critiques; abstract and representational artworks were being made. On the Rue Visconti in Paris, Christo created a barrier of used oil barrels several months after the Berlin wall was erected. In case art viewers weren’t able to make the connection between the impromptu street intervention and its political context, the work was called Iron Curtain.

Christo's Iron Curtain

For me, there was an interesting shift on BCAM's second floor, moving from the most bifurcated display of the whole show (in the second gallery) with one wall of abstract painting from the FRG and another wall of social realism from the GDR. Turning the corner into the next room and era (art from the 60’s and 70’s) one can re-read the infusion of Pop art sensibility as a transformation of social realism to capitalist realism.

Getting back to Storr’s point about reading New York’s abstraction as an attempt to move away from the political (or inversely—in the telling by Hans Haacke—German abstract art’s pointed political position): part of what this all comes down to is the question of how much agency an artist had in the reading of their work. Storr seems to be at the far end of the spectrum, pointedly noting the minutia of each artist’s life, party affiliations, and circumstances, confabulating an environmental matrix that poops out the artist (it is no small irony that when similar circumstantial evidence is used to critique Storr's curatorial practice, he refutes it in the pages of Artforum as ad hominem arguments).

Storr's contextualization can be problematic. As Elaine paraphrased Willem de Kooning, “One can hardly expect a work of art to do anything in the world when it is trivialized as a scrap of evidence pertaining to its maker’s eccentricity. You make a painting about a crazy world, and they say it was made by a crazy artist. That’s a loser’s game.” My recent post on the Guggenheim’s misleading presentation of FG-T is another example.

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Hans Haacke at REDCAT

Fritz Winter's Große Komposition vor Blau 1953

Hans Haacke, along with Stephanie Barron, and Norman Klein spoke at REDCAT. Klein referred to Haacke's portait of Ronald Reagan (on view at LACMA's Two Germanys) as, "The face that was the architect of the economic plan that just collapsed." The opposing photograph of demonstrators was the largest political demonstration in Germany since the Nuremberg Rallies. Not organized by the government, the protest was in response to Reagan's visit to the Bundestag in Bonn, making the case for placing U.S. nuclear missiles in West Germany. 

Earlier in the day Barron--co-curator or The Art of Two Germanys--toured the exhibition at LACMA with Haacke. It was in the first room, standing in front of an abstract canvas by Fritz Winter that Barron learned the Winter was Haacke's instructor in Kassel.

Hans Haacke's Germania 1993 German Pavilion, Venice Biennale

Haacke spoke of Hans Sedlmayr, an Austrian-born art historian (Nazi party member and later, an advisor to the Vatican) who saw abstract art as an attack on middle  class values. The social idealism under the Third Reich (and later the social realism in the GDR) was responded to by home-grown abstract artists showing at Documenta (in 1955) as well as NY AbEx painters whose shipping costs were subsidized by the CIA. In this context, abstract art was more than an academic argument, "It meant something," said Haacke. As abstract art lost its political luster, Haacke moved on to other media. 

For the 1993 Venice Biennale, Klaus Bußmann was asked by the Foreign Office--which controls the German pavilion--to curate work representing the newly united Germany. So bothered by the demand, he included Haacke-who lives in New York, and Korean-born Nam June Paik--who was teaching in Germany at the time. Haacke tore up the floor of Hitler's remodel of the pavilion. He said visitors to the installation picked up tiles and hurled them to the floor, breaking them even more, taking out their grief and anger on what transpired under the Nazis. 

Édouard Manet's Execution of Emperor Maximilian 1869

Earlier in the evening Klein read off Tom Coburn's ammendment to the economic stimulus plan which stated in part:

"None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, arts center, or highway beautification project, including renovation, remodeling, construction, salaries, furniture, zero-gravity chairs, big screen televisions, beautification, rotating pastel lights, and dry heat saunas."

Klein noted the equivalency created between places like LACMA and "rotating pastel lights." 

Time Magazine's Richard Lacayo noted part of the debate on the House floor:

"The low point was probably the remark by House Republican Jack Kingston of Georgia that it was wrong to spend money on the National Endowment for the Arts when in his state "we have real people out of work" — the implication being of course that people who build theater sets, or play in orchestras or work in museums aren't "real" workers."

It would appear that even despite the best intentions of artists who attempt to set themselves above the politcal fracas, or debate the 'legitimacy' of political art, all art is political.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo's Striking Worker Murdered, 1934 at The Getty

Marshall Astor makes note of a New York Times article on art exhibit in Baghdad:

"...in a society at war with itself, or under extreme transition, the production of any art at all cannot escape becoming political and politicized…"

I would add that Iraq is at war with more that itself; it is also at war with the United States, another country undergoing extreme transition. That would mean that art made in the United States cannot excape the political.

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Erin Cosgrove, 3R1N |<()56R0V3

In Julian Gough's essay on What Manner of Person Art Thou? (on view at the Hammer) he states:

"Erin Cosgrove is a heretic, whose work critiques both Disney and The Simpsons. For her, animation, like salvation, is direct, personal, and deeply felt. She skewers the sentimental lies of Disney, but even more bravely in an American liberal arts context, she points out the fatal flaw in The Simpsons' Enlightnment project. Because The Simpsons, brilliant as it was in the early seasons (and still is, in flashes), has never acknowledged death."

Death may be an impossible dream for Bart Simpson, now in his 20th year in 4th grade (with no end in sight), but death has also been scrubbed clean from our mediated present, where thousands of flag-draped caskets making their way from the Middle East to American soil invisibly. 

Erin Cosgrove’s exhibition “What Manner of Person Art Thou?” on view at Carl Berg Gallery provides the viewer with a back story to her video by the same name (currently on view at the Hammer Museum). We are introduced to a Henry Darger-esque recluse, on-line gamer, and casualty of a scurvy-induced junk food diet. The rear gallery gives us a short video on the foundational scroll—as well as the remaining segments—which take us from the Garden of Eden through the Apocalypse. Cosgrove translates the running commentary of the Bayeux Tapestry to the Pig Latin of “L337 Sp34k” (Leet Speak) the vernacular of Generation Y chat rooms. The front gallery seduces with large-scale animation cells of her polychronic universe, populated by mashups of perverse illuminated manuscript marginalia, showing us a contemporary Garden of Earthly Delights. Those with art history degrees will pat themselves on the back after picking out bits of Giotto, color palates from African tapestries, and the like.

It seems like the best plan of action for the past eight years was to hole up in a cloistered space, copying mystical and secular tomes, and hope for the plague to end and the enlightenment to come. In some ways, Cosgrove did just that. She spent five years meticulously hand painting each animation cell in her hour-long video, illuminating her visual universe for future generations. But if we've (hopefully) turned a corner, putting our financially profligate ways behind us, how will Cosgrove's practice respond in her future production? Perhaps like Martin Luther, we'll find it nailed to the door across the street. 

On view though March 14, 2009 at Carl Berg Gallery, across from LACMA.

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Felix Gonzalez-Torres Decon-text-ualized

Felix Gonzalez-Torres' Untitled (Golden) 1997-98

The Guggenheim recently acquired the art pictured above. They had this (in part) to say about the piece:

Conceived shortly before the artist’s death, “Untitled” (Golden) (1995) extends across a space as a luminous curtain, shimmering with faceted tendrils of faux-gilded beads. The gentle confrontation of this golden screen provokes the tactile and sensory, inviting the viewer to transform its shape simply by walking through. This collective and public experience of doing so, however, belies the intimate nature of Gonzalez-Torres’s other beaded curtain works, which often reference the organic and inorganic substances associated with battling AIDS. A kind of membrane, as pliable and permeable as the biological materials that compose the cells of the human body, “Untitled” (Golden) is a work of transitory passage—from life to death, public to private, the known to the unknown.

What are those "organic and inorganic substances" (emphasis mine)? The trio of beaded curtain works in red, blue, and gold shimmer like the fluids they sign for: blood, water, and urine.

Yet despite their apparent simplicity and emphemerality, these acts can evoke far more complex social and political undertones. Conjuring the vocabulary of Minimalism and post-Minimalism while reinvigorating it with open-ended content, Gonzalez-Torres leaves the construction of meaning to the participation of viewers, only subtly hinting at the autobiographical and incendiary in his untitled works.

This bit of didactic utterly transforms FG-T's open-ended content away from the incendiary; who wants to tell some stroller-pushing family that they're being metaphorically peed upon by some queer who died of AIDS?

I bring this up in relation to Nicholas' most recent post on queer obstruction, and more specifically related to my own fear of post-facto depoliticizing of work that can easily be reterritorialized by some uptight curator.

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Francis Alÿs' Fabiola at LACMA

Francis Alÿs' Fabiola at LACMA: Detail of Installation

On the third floor of LACMA's Ahmanson building is Francis Alÿs' installation of his collection of Saint Fabiola paintings. Saint Fabiola was a wealthy Roman matron who converted to Christianity in the fourth century AD and (among other things) established Rome's first hospital for the poor. She is not one of Christiandom's most notable saints; like most folk in early church history, scant historical records leave no details of what she atually looked like. Some fifteen hundred years later Jean-Jacques Henner painted a confabulated portrait of her, which caitalized on Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman's racy bestseller, Fabiola, or the Church of the Catacombs, a confabulation itself. The original painting was lost, but reproductions of the work propigated her profile like a meme.

Francis Alÿs' Fabiola at LACMA: Video of Installation

Due to an abusive first marriage and her work with the sick, Fabiola became the patron saint of both nurses and abused women. These small paintings where probably purchased or made for personal veneration, most likely by nurses or abused women seeking inner peace or strength. When Belgian artist Alÿs moved to Mexico some thirty years ago, he started collecting these canvases at flea markets. On display are close to three hundred of these canvases.

One of the ablilities of art is to help us see new things in the stuff that is always in front of our eyes. Through repetition we begin to see the variations in the artists' skills and abilities, features that change with the era, and variation in the wear and tear, from well preserved to fished out of the trash heap.

Francis Alÿs' Fabiola at LACMA: Context of Installation

Associations can be made between Alÿs and Michael Asher, who had his own turn in LACMA's European painting and decorative art galleries. There is also a bit of David Wilson, whose encyclopedic museum (of Jurassic Technology) displays his own idiosycratic mashup of high, low, and faux.

On display through March 29, 2009.

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Oulipo Impresario

I recently had a studio visit with Steven Hull, who was down here for the independent book fair at MOCA PDC. This got me to thinking about collaborative projects. The drawback is that working with a group of artists can be like herding cats. On the other hand, artists do enjoy the freedom that comes from working withing a set of constraints.

Earlier that day, the topic of "Ouvroir de littérature potentielle" came up at Dennis Cooper's blog. One Oulipo constraint involved something called N+7, where each noun would be replaced by one that came seven entries past the original as it appeared in a dictionary.

I came across an N+7 generator on the interweb: enter a text, and versions N+0 to N+15 are churned out. Comparing the different versions, it seems that seven worked the best. N+1 often replaced a word with a minor variation, which gives the appearance of a typo; it's fairly evident what the author meant. N+15 was difficult to read. N+7 sometimes gives words that fall into the same entomological class: flows becomes fluids, part become partisan.

Here's a paragraph from a post I made about younger vs. older artists:

Quite often the minds of young children are referred to as sponges. But there eventually comes a point where information flows the other way. Sponges become fountains. For the younger artist, information coming in gets barely masticated, and moist chunks of theory and fact might be recognizable and picked out in the resulting spew. Those of us who are so old we fart dust, the concepts ingested twenty years have now been incorporated on the cellular level. This morning’s toast is moistened by saliva that was last night’s consommé. Eventually it all gets shit out, along with dead cells that are byproducts of body’s regeneration process. For the older artist, the stuff that comes out is seen as a part of the body—the personal—no longer recognizable as the stuff that went in.

Below in the N+7 version:

Quite often the miniatures of young chimeras are referred to as a spoon. But there eventually comes a polarity where ingredient fluids the other wean. Spoons become foxhounds. For the younger aside, ingredient coming in gets barely masticated, and moist chutes of thermostat and fag might be recognizable and picked out in the resulting spin. Those of us who are so old we fastener dust-up, the concertos ingested twenty yes-men have now been incorporated on the cellular liaison. This morning’s toddler is moistened by saliva that was last night’s constabulary. Eventually it all gets shoemaker out, along with dead cenotaphs that are byproducts of body’s regeneration procurer. For the older aside, the stutter that comes out is seen as a partisan of the body—the personal—no longer recognizable as the stutter that went in.

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Queerland Gawking and Slumming

Wu Tsang's Riff on The Silver Platter's sign at UCLA's MFA Open Studios

Aristotle said you can't put your foot (or fist) in the same river twice; in the second instance it's not the same river nor the same foot. What's left out of this philosophical equation is the change that takes place to the river when a foreign body enters the flow. In Nicholas and my on-going conversation on queer abstraction, I think we've come to the realization that the "moving away from" aspect of abstraction can be better defined as evidence of Cultural Deterritorialization, à la Deleuze and Guattari.

During my recent illness I watched more TV than I'm used to. I couldn't help but be startled by main-stream media's (MSM) use of 'gay' as a device in sitcoms and other narratives. Often it has to do with a straight male character's uncomfortableness with intimacy or some other non-masculine trait. In MSM, 'gay' functions as the conceit of acceptable strangeness. For main-stream gay culture, the push to normalization--the rush to adopt breeder tropes like marriage and military service--strains to gain acceptability while ignoring the inherent strangeness that defines us.

As part of the rush to normalization, the queer body has incurred an infestation of friend and foe alike. Recently Ed Winkleman made note of the discovery through the mashup of Goolgle Maps and a list of Prop 8 donors that Maureen Mularkey, painter of gays, gave a thousand bucks to ban on gay marriage forces. At the other end of the spectrum is the non-malevolent art crowd that takes over the Silver Platter on Tuesday nights (which recently achieved the cultural caché of Artforum's Top Ten List).

Back when Daniel Pineda was still drinking Capri Suns, I used to frequent non-gay identified watering holes like California de Noche, Score, and Silver Platter. Before it closed, California de Noche featured a mix of hard-core Cholas, Ranchero types, and their admirers (vestidas); Score was an elephant graveyard for drag queens, along with a handful of neighborhood alcoholics that kept the place in business. Score is now Bar 107, a straight bar in the downtown "Banking District." Long gone are these nominally homosexual establishments that never saw stacks of gay rags by the front door--and never got listed in the gay tourist guides.

Though the Silver Platter is still in business, it has undergone a reterritorialization from being promoted in places like Artforum and the LA Weekly's "Best Of" issue. This is not to lament the loss of one of the city's micro-cultural venues, but to point out the consequence of the interest and benevolence by the art-world invaders that is not dissimilar to the good intentions of the Franciscan friars that accompanied the Spanish conquest of New Spain. While it's politically appropriate to lament the destruction of Aztec culture, without the subsequent reterritorialization by Catholic Spain, my Mestizo father (and therefore I) wouldn't exist. Likewise, Wildness creates a new history.

From Stevee Postman's Incarnation Series

In the era of globalization, we can't have hermetic cultures absent of cultural mixing. At the same time, I really believe there are some fragile cultural spaces that warrant a bit of respectful isolation. The feelings, sights, smells, and testosterone vibe of a sex club would be lost if the space was infiltrated by art patrons sipping glasses of white wine. When a tribe becomes a spectacle, the tribe's functions cease to exist. Still, multi-culturalism warrants the portrayal and documentation of the multitude of ways we group ourselves together.

Speaking from personal experience, there's a big difference between participating in the scenes depicted in a Mapplethorpe photograph and viewing his images; the photographs do less harm to the cultural microcosm than say, turning a leather bar into a mixed straight/gay club. Running into Dean Sameshima at the Gauntlet is expected, running into Zachary Drucker at the Gauntlet was surprising, running into Eli and Edythe Broad at the Gauntlet would change the essential nature of the river. Besides "the leather community" and trannie bars, I'm also thinking of faerie gatherings and my experience at the California Men's Gathering.

The conclusion I'm coming to is that an art exhibition can function as a protective nexus between the signified and the viewer. I guess that's one against relational aesthetics.

-0-

The image above came in an email from Rick Castro. His gallery, Antebellum will be hosting a show of work loosely associated the the Radical Faerie movement. The opening is on February 29, 2009 from 7 to 9 pm. Antebellum is a few blocks west of LACE on Las Palmas. In a nod to the preservation of the vibe, if you come dressed like Jeff Koons, they'll charge you ten bucks to get in. If you come dressed like Zachary Drucker it's five, and if you go naked, it's free!

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History Repeats Itself: Berlin, Baghdad and the Politics of Art

From Sibylle Bergemann's series A Monument 1975-1986,
on view at LACMA's Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures.

The photo below was taken seventeen years later and a continent away. Though there are visual similarities, the statue of Friedrich Engels is being installed in the Marx-Engels Forum in Berlin Mitte, and remains on view to this day. The statue below, like the man depicted, have become cannon fodder. Interestingly, the minaret below has a secular equivalent in the GDR-built Berliner Fernsehturm above.

Below is another pairing; Bergemann's photo of the monument leaving the Baltic island of Usedom, en route to its installation, and Robert's picture of me from this past summer. There was a small cadre of us Communists, patiently waiting our turn to have a picture taken.

Bergemann's photo is being used to advertise LACMA's show, and I expect it's meant to foreshadow the demise of the GDR. More recently Bergemann's work has benefited from "Ostalgie" (a conflation of the German words for East and nostalgia) though her original intent was to document her friend, sculptor Ludwig Engelhardt's construction of the monument.

On a tangentially related topic, I find it a bit curious that positive comments about political art are usually couched with a phrase that most political art sucks. Ed Winkleman's recent praise of Emily Jacir's Where We Come From begins:

"As anyone who's read here long knows, I hold a low opinion of most so-called political art. To use art to advance a political agenda, per se, always compromises the output in my view."

Marshall Astor begins his praise of Laith al-Amiri begins:

"Today, most political art lacks relevance, it’s become forum for culture jamming remixes from over-educated 1st Worlders who think they know what’s best for folks on the other side of things."

An hominem, anyone? Though I already stated it in my recent Two Germanys post, it's worth restating that all art is created in political and social contexts. For the artists of the GDR, one could paint in the state-sanctioned social realist style, work in secret, outside the system, emigrate, or go to jail: one can address their context, or turn away. As the Mahābhārata tells us, one must accept the ramifications and responsibility of both action and inaction.

So on one hand, there seems to be a risk of making art that's less than it could be by staking out a political position; on the other hand there is the risk of coming across as a bit like Leni Riefenstahl, making beautiful art while blithely ignoring the political context.

As in the case of Laith al-Amiri's recently destroyed monument to the Bush shoe-thrower Muntadhir al-Zaidi, artists (in LA) can create and work "outside the system" like this this this or this, or install public works of art through the sanctioned channels like the Department of Cultural Affairs (as long as they're willing to propose something akin to a medium-sized Peter Shire).

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LACMA Unframed

The View of Mt. Lee from BCAM

LACMA's Unframed (in the links on the right) is doing a better job than most of bringing their cyberselves into the 2.0 future.

I thought I'd post some recent pics I took on LACMA's campus along with links to their posts on related topics. Above is the view from BCAM that goes with this post.

Urban Light, Urban Infrastructure

Chris Burden's Urban Light warrants it's own page (in addition to this post). The page includes a quiz and print-on-demand book of visitor-submitted UL photos. In one interview Burden talks about wanting to draw the viewers attention to the aesthetics of the city's infrastructure, so I thought I'd post my pic of the fire-sprinkler valve (which would normally be painted a Renzo Piano red).

The Art of Two Germanys, The Car of Don Bachardy

Not mentioned in this post on the temporary car loans on display under LACMA's entrance pavilion is artist Don Bachardy's cherry Bug from the Peterson Automotive Museum across the street. Imagine, Christopher Isherwood was there.

Reflections of the Resnick Pavillion

This post on the Resnick Pavilion links to the live construction cam, as well as back to this blog. What a tangled web indeed.

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The Multi-Valient Narratives of Two Germanys

A Detail of Eli Broad's Haacke donated to LACMA

I expect there will be more than one post here on LACMA's The Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures, on display on the middle floor of the BCAM at LACMA through April 19th. The show is very good, and worth multiple visits. Before I type on the art proper, I want to comment on the construction of art history by Stephanie Barron, Senior Curator of Modern Art, LACMA, and co-curator Dr. Eckhart Gillen, Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH.

Quite often (at its worst) we are presented with a domino theory of art history, like the first chapter of Matthew where Abraham and a long line of begets end in a baby Jesus: we are given a narrative of isms that culminate in our post-modern selves. This is not the fault of a lax curatorial process as much as it is the architecture of language and our brains. The world is made of objects and concepts--these exist, act, or are acted upon; narratives are intrinsic in our descriptive mechanisms. We may feel a smug superiority to ancients who saw a geological feature like a volcanic eruption as the wrath of the gods, but even today when presented with parataxic clauses, we will insert our own story.

Stanley Fish points this out in his piece on Obama's inaugural address, where he uses the museum-as-metaphor:

"The opposite of parataxis is hypotaxis, the marking of relations between propositions and clause by connectives that point backward or forward. One kind of prose is additive – here’s this and now here’s that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word. It is the difference between walking through a museum and stopping as long as you like at each picture, and being hurried along by a guide who wants you to see what you’re looking at as a stage in a developmental arc she is eager to trace for you."

In The Art of Two Germany's we are not presented with a narrative that ends with capitalism triumphant, nor a simple series of artistic movements. The exhibition is bookended with newsreel footage of Dresden, a conventional-weapon precursor to Hiroshima, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But whether the artists have chosen to turn away from events with the tropes of abstraction or confront it with social realism, the art was made in that context. For the artists of the FRG eager to rejoin the contemporary art conversation, there may have been little that referenced the war years. But this could be seen as consciously turning away, or like the history of exhibitions since 9/11, the conquests of Iraq and Afghanistan depicted at LACMA are by Genghis Kahn not George Bush. In either case the dearth of contemporary context in the art on display can be read as a conscious (or unconscious) aversion--or not. The move towards abstraction could be seen as a turn away from the representational idealism of the Nazi era. Likewise, the turn to social realism in the GDR can be seen as a byproduct of the fact that most contemporary artists left when labeled degenerate during the war. Those who stayed behind were mostly illustrators.

In Barron and Gillen's history of the two cold war cultures, the narratives constructed by LACMA's visitors may say more about the viewer than it does about any curatorial agenda. So stop for as long as you like at each picture, and make your own developmental arc.

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