In preparation for her debut as the Critics’ Table LA editor, Juliana Halpert, hit “more art exhibitions than any one person should within a two-week span.” We love to hear it! To map her picks and plan your route, enter the Critic’s Table hashtag #TCT in the search bar of the See Saw app.
On a recent Friday evening, I was loitering in the parking lot of a certain famed Hollywood eatery, doling out cigarettes to a few fellow guests of the gallery dinner that had just concluded. We were all several martinis deep, and well-lubricated; my (gay, male) companions talked shop (recreational sex) while I listened, prudishly. One began to inveigh against a trend he had observed among LA-based partners, which was a widespread, rather carefree neglect of back-door hygiene. “Wait—really?” I sputtered, eyes a bit wider than they should have been. “Oh, totally,” the other man concurred, a grin spreading across his face as he pulled on his American Spirit. “It’s a painter’s town.”
At the risk of sanitizing that wonderful remark, I will concur that, after touring more art exhibitions than any one person should within a two-week span, Los Angeles indeed remains a painter’s town. I will forever pledge fealty to this smoggy, hilly sprawl over New York, but I nevertheless read Johanna’s description of the latter’s art world and its renewed attention to OG-conceptualism and structural critique with a lick of envy. The fall shows out here are confident, robust, muscular; there are hardly any missteps or bad outfits. But almost everything operates within a rather ironclad, uniform structure, and Big Painting still dominates the majority of its white walls. The mood is professional and buttoned-up, arriving at the meeting on time. Feathers are unruffled. Every gallery’s asshole is squeaky clean.
Monica Majoli
Through November 21
These were the thoughts I had while driving home from that dinner, at least—and they were challenged the very next afternoon, over at the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in West Hollywood. Since 1985, the archives have been housed in a tight, windowless space on the second story of a building off Melrose, and maintained only by volunteers until last year, when they appointed an archivist and executive director. Tall, metal shelves are stacked to the ceiling with boxes labeled with Post-its, topical tomes such as The Gay Militants, Sappho Was a Right-On Woman, and So You Want To Be A Lesbian?, a Mia Hamm Barbie doll, copies of the Gay Yellow Pages, vanity license plates that read AMZNPWR and LESBEFM—I could go on.
Around noon, I joined the writer Andrew Berardini, the curator Nahui Garcia, and only a few others inside the densely packed space for a tour of “Monica Majoli: Countervision,” led by the artist herself. Facilitated by the indispensable Los Angeles Nomadic Division, which, since 2008, has organized an array of art projects and programs in the city’s expanded field, “Countervision” certainly counteracts more conventional modes of display. Muted, medium-sized drawings by Majoli are mounted to the end caps of shelves and sheathed in a flat file, available to peruse. Rendered in colored pencil on deep grey, mossy-green, rust-orange, and chestnut paper, each drawing is affixed to a filing-cabinet grey picture mat, but otherwise unglazed and unframed.
“It’s really meant to be a physical and intimate experience,” Majoli explained as she pulled the works out of their drawers, each depicting a softly shaded configuration of nude women figures tangled in amorous and/or ceremonious embrace. Majoli’s compositions are the culmination of a year of research into the archives of four lesbian photographers, and modeled after the women’s own pictures. Most were taken at the Ovulars, a series of week-long photography workshops held from 1979–82 at Rootworks, a lesbian-feminist intentional community and “women’s land” in southern Oregon. “They made a lot of group photographs,” Majoli elaborated, passing out copies of The Blatant Image, the magazine born from the workshops. We politely perused these relics of ’70s women’s lib, but were all rather meek, perhaps a bit unsure how to calibrate ourselves in a show of such a different color, feeling a bit like visitors to a church of a different congregation.
Malerie Marder
Seasons | 422 Ord Street, 2nd Floor
Through October 17
Afterwards, I kept seeing naked (cis, white) women on walls everywhere. I’m plenty aware that there is no shortage of this subject across the full span of Western art history and media, but their recurring cameos across the September shows still felt a touch conspicuous. Seasons, an artist-run space nestled inside the artist-run space Fulcrum Press in Chinatown—it sure is tough out there for artist-run spaces—mounted an exhibition by the veteran photographer Malerie Marder.
In 1999, Marder’s work was included in “Another Girl, Another Planet,” the career-launching show for women photographing women, and Roberta Smith subsequently lumped her and her Yale classmates Justine Kurland and Katy Grannan into the group she called the “Beautiful Young Things.” God, it was such a different era, when Yale-y, cinematic photography was all the rage. Fresh prints of old work are tacked to Seasons’s walls in a Tillmans-esque array; Marder’s nude women subjects are drenched in moody lighting and captured kissing other women, kissing men, posed reclining on beds with babies, walking down a dirt road at night, or doing it doggy-style atop a mattress pad. In a standout, solarized self-portrait, Marder lies naked on the floor of a closet with her legs raised against the mirrored door, multiplying tits and gams and pudenda ad infinitum.
Alessandra Acierno
Sea View | 1300 N Orange Drive
Through October 24
Over at Sea View’s new-ish location in Hollywood, Alessandra Acierno’s exhibition, “Everything I See I Swallow,” fixates on the same subject matter. Her small and medium-sized paintings portray young, unsmiling, brown-haired women—often topless or nude—lurking inside flat, patchy compositions, rendered in glowing, gloomy hues. One work is based on Henri Matisse’s Bathers with a Turtle; another on Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, although Acierno’s style more closely recalls the bold outlines and dreamy symbolism of Gauguin-y Synthetism. In the hands of lesser artists, these nods would seem too pat and purely citational, something something about women in art history. These paintings are almost ersatz, but they marry modernism’s moves and obsession with the supposed mysteries of the female psyche to a super saturnine affect that somehow reads contemporary af. Maybe despair is the new detachment.
(Allow me a few more examples of whatever it is we’re currently trying to work out about women: At Castle, also in Hollywood, a suite of fashionable drawings by David Rappeneau depict lithe, blithe, cigarette-smoking, and—yes—mostly topless sirens floating through liquid-y urban landscapes. [Rappeneau is French; temper any expectations for “body positivity.”] Around the corner, at Regen Projects, a side show of smaller works and preparatory studies by the late, great Silke Otto-Knapp includes the lurid Portrait (Doll), from 2007, and several watercolor and gouache sketches of dancing figures. They’re spectral, melancholy, and childlike, gracefully giving up the ghost of girlhood. There’s no figuration to be found in “Hard Line Women” at Nonaka-Hill, but please heed the title. I am doing that exhibition a grand disservice by glossing it here; its assembly of abstract works by Japanese women artists from the past 50 years amounts to enthralling, singular scholarship.)
Adam Higgins
Chris Sharp | 5538 Santa Monica Blvd
Through October 10
All that said, there’s always a stick in the spokes of any sweeping generalization. Or does the exception prove the rule? If affective depictions of Ophelias occupy one end of a spectrum, Adam Higgins’s show “Lollipop” sits squarely at the other. This is hardly a condemnation of the most bewildering show I saw all season. Seven new semi-photorealistic paintings can’t be summed up in a simple clause. Each work presents a faithful reproduction of common—generic, even—scenery or subjects: the Empire State Building, McWay Cove in Big Sur, the Pont des Invalides in Paris, a pigsty, a seascape, a Caesar salad, the American flag.
Resting on top, at the full width of each canvas, sits a giant, gleaming screwdriver, painted with even greater vérité. The tools cast subtle shadows across the pictures beneath, revealing them to be just that: flat, pat, dead images. The gesture is complex, wry, and “pretty perverse,” as Sharp remarked with surprise, as if still working it out for himself too. With these giant phalli, Higgins pokes at Americanism, masculinity, kitsch—and the forever entanglement between each. While womanhood might never not be shown as tethered to our bodies, “Lollipop” suggests that “being a man” is built out of other stuff—bluster, fishing boats, love of country, and being an asshole.
More of our favorite stories from the Critics’ Table
Five Nights on Elizabeth Street: Whitney Mallett’s Guide to the Fall Openings
Conceptualism’s Resurgence, a Growing Critics’ Table, and More Reflections on This Season in Art
Betty Parsons, the Artist-Dealer Who Set the Scene for Abstract Expressionism, Gets Her Due
Does a New Exhibition at the Tate Dim the Power of Ana Mendieta’s Legacy?
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?
