OCMA's 2010 California Biennial

Brian Dick's (in collaboration with Christen Sperry-Garcia)
The Nationwide Museum Mascot Project presents: OCMAscot, 2010

In the recent history of biennials, art writers--from academia to the rags of cyberspace--have tended to rate these semiannual showcases of contemporania on a scale ranging from feh-plus to ugh-minus. As a fellow typer in the blog-o-sphere once said,

…we long ago discovered what has come to be known as Perreault's Percentage. No matter how talented the curator(s) or how vast the pool of artists, not more than 10 percent…of any large survey is worth looking at. Why is this? Judgments are limited. Plus, art worth saving is simply too hard to make…

Brian Dick's (in collaboration with Christen Sperry-Garcia)
The Nationwide Museum Mascot Project's Piñata Cozy with Glowfitti Room (detail), 2010
Inside the darkened van-cave one can "draw" on the glow-in-the-dark painted walls with the provided pen lights;
above is my temporary Lascaux hand. 

One possibility is that the sheer volume and diversity of art being made today is far beyond the capacity and taste of any one observer.  It's like every all-you-can-eat buffet in Las Vegas stretched end to end: cordilleras of previously frozen shellfish, herds of cattle at the abattoirs of the carving station, plethoras of petit-fours, and enough iceberg lettuce to tear a fatal gash in the hull of the Titanic. Translated into art, the viewer trudges form object to object, picking at the familiar and sniffing at the new until declining blood sugar forces an aesthetic harumph and retreat. Besides curatorial shock and awe, the another survey show tactic is to arbitrarily narrow the curatorial parameters by geography or age.

David Adey's Flock, 2010

From my experience, it seemed no worse to let pure capitalism guide the curatorial process (à la Art Basel's Art Unlimited) than pretend  that your curator is presenting some zeitgeist--when in reality the show show is predominantly white, male, or the artist's come from a small coterie of galleries.

Looking at things from the other side of the fence, one can almost pity the damned-either-way curator: be inclusive, and be accused of hodgepodge-ism and lack of curatorial rigor; narrow the focus and suffer the slings and arrows of argumentum ad-hominem.

Los Angeles Urban Rangers' Portable Ranger Station, 2009-2010
The illegitimate love child of the Center for Land Use Interpretation and Ikea. 

I think that even the most sophisticated viewer attends these surveys with the secret hope that some curator will pull back the curtain and reveal the Next Big Thing; some artistic movement or collective rejoinder to our cultural moment and the art that came before.

Way back when our love of art eventually brought us face to face with Gardner, Jason, or Hartt in the guise of Art 101, those color plates were like jewels in a literary saga--movements spread like communism across Asia and the Americas, and misunderstood artists went boldly against conventions like Jimmy Stewart went to Washington.

Electronic Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g. lab's The Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT),  2007-2009

Perhaps some historical perspective is in order.

A hundred years ago to the month, Roger Fry curated Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Gallery. What would be considered a pandering blockbuster today, the show was universally panned, and for a laugh London's Tatler printed a Van Gogh sideways, calling it "Plague-Stricken Rats Up a Tree." In those Edwardian times the conventional art came from the academy, work that is usually seen as kitsch today. But the art of 1910 shouldn't be seen as a simple dichotomy between the likes of Alma-Tadema and Cézanne. Concurrent with the ruckus in London, Kandinsky was creating his first abstractions, Meiji period artists in Japan were incorporating Western styles, and movements like analytic Cubism, Futurism, Die Brücke, the arts Nouveau and Crafts, along with the  Fauvists, the Ashcan School, and photo-taking Eds--Steichen and Weston (among others) were all making stuff. What plays out today like dominoes (or sequential pages in an art history text) were essentially a jumble of reactionary, conventional, interacting, and isolated movements.

Sherin Guirguis' Bein El-Qasrein, 2010

What is different today is that we have the tubes of the internet connecting academic art journals; mainstream art press; dead tree dailies, weeklies, and monthlies with paid and edited art writers on staff; along with the writers, picture posters, and linkers of the blog world, and of course all the folks that participate by leaving comments. The world isn't more multi-cultural than it was a hundred years ago; the difference is that we now have the capacity to cobble together artists with divergent interests who aren't at all interested in communicating with each other. The political activist, formalist, conceptualist, pseudo-institution, and relational aesthetician get lined up shoulder to shoulder with the painter, drawer, assembler, photographer, and video artist, and the only thing this fake multiculturalism does is make it easier to mow all the artists down with our critical-conceptual machine gun.

Nikki Pressley's Untitled, 2010

Some 700 words ago I had set out to review the Orange County Museum of Art's California Biennial. Compared to past iterations, there seemed to be more state-wide and less mid-career artist representation than past shows. There doesn't seem to be any theme, which is perhaps a theme itself in this post-movement world we live in.

Patrick Wilson's Romeo, 2010

Driving back home, I had that same feeling I sometimes get after visiting LACMA, that other named-after-a-county museum of art. As interesting as Latin American Art, Korean Art, or privately amassed collections are, one can't help sense and underlying urge by the museum to pander to their various constituencies, e.g. Los Angeles' large Latino population, the museum's Mid-Wilshire Korean neighbors, and most importantly, the major donors and collectors who sit on the board of trustees. As Euro-centric as the East Coast's encyclopedic museums were, one doesn't feel the Met was buying their Titian or Caravaggio to entice the folks in Little Italy to come visit their museum.

Nina Waisman's Between Bodies / Tijuana, 2008-2010
Image of your faithful scribe (looking like the Professor Farnsworth from Futurama); image courtesy Diane Calder.  

 Like other late capitalist institutions, each aspect of the museum's function is driven by a cost-benefit analysis that must ultimately support the long-term fiscal viability of the institution. It should have come as no surprise that MOCA--in it's darkest financial days--was so quick to consider selling off parts of its collection. Education departments foster the museum's future visitor base, the web presence sends it tendrils into social media sites to create interest among the electronically connected, and opening night galas create value for the regular members.

Agitprop's The Third Party, 2010
Can art that's made from stuff bought at Home Depot be lumped together as an art movement?

From this post-Marxist viewpoint, one cannot help but see Patrick Wilson's, John Zurier's, and Sherin Guirguis' abstract paintings--as beautiful and technically astounding as they are--as appealing to an older donor base with more conventional tastes. The Relational Aesthetic of artists Brian Dick, Los Angeles Urban Rangers, and Agitprop/David White are so kid friendly that it must warm the hearts of those in the education department. (Come to think of it, I didn't see anything in the show that warranted a "Parental Discretion Advised" warning label; even Wu Tsang's transgender hookers are family friendly!) The collective Electronic Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g. lab, Camilo Ontiveros, and Carlee Fernandez give props to Orange County's growing Latino population as well as the critical-political aesthetic.

Gil Blank's No Title, No Date
Image Courtesy LaMontagne Gallery, Boston

The problem with eclecticism in a large show is that artists that flex both critical thinking muscle and aesthetic skill--like Nikki Pressley, Drew Heitzler, and Eve Fowler--can get their subtle voices drowned out in an everything-into-the-pot biennial. Nina Waisman's sound installation reads quite differently depending on if it gets conceptually lumped with Brian Dick's interactive piñata mascot or EDT/b.a.n.g lab's Transborder Immigrant Tool.

Zoe Crosher's Like Miko Smiling for Christopher Williams, 2008
Image Courtesy of the artist and DCKT Contemporary, New York
Bonus points for referencing an Artforum cover!

My biggest head-scratching moments came when looking at work that made me think far too much about another artist's practice. Why was Gil Blank included and not Larry Johnson (who has a much stronger connection to California)? Camilo Ontiveros' Free Entry smacks of Michael Asher's piece in the last Whitney Biennial, accomplishes less, and in the end gets trumped by the museum's citation of the UCRA. Zoe Crosher's Unraveling of Michelle duBois smacked of Kaari Upson's Larry Project, and Alex Israel's Property is essentially a lobotomized and testosterone/Jason Rhoades injected version of Megan Cotts prop installations from the year before.

Alex Israel's Property (Detail: Desire), 2010 

The best advice might be to buy OCMA's $20 ticket for the run of the California Biennial. The wall tags list the time and day of associated conversations and talks. Return and hear the artist's talk, or give some quality time to a few of the works that appeal to you. Most of the artists don't have long exhibition histories (I counted two each in their 40's and 50's) and many live, show, and work in points far from the Pasadena to Santa Monica art axis.

On the Wall Next to Drew Heitzler's OCMA Stack (detail) 2010
This is one of the problems inherent in today's multiple modes of production. There were several "stacks" in the biennial, reminiscent of Felix Gonzalez-Torres' unlimited editions. Los Angeles Urban Rangers, David Wilson, and others and take aways and work you could touch. Eventually the viewer gets put off when he becomes frustrated by different expectations from art that is identical on a formal level.

The Orange County Museum of Art 2010 California Biennial runs from October 24 through March 13, 2011.

California Biennial 2010: Orange County Museum of Art

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