So I couldn’t bear WACK! at MOCA, and given the sheer number of female artists that I work with everyday and have shown over the years, I’m somewhat skeptical of the “giving women their due” attitude that I smelled when the “Year of the Woman” organizational mailers started landing on my desk, but if anything has come out of it (aside from the long-term effects of WACK!’s catalog on the art history majors of ten years from now) that turns my crank it’s the Jori Finkel curated Identity Theft at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. I spent most of yesterday at SMMOA, in my capacity of Discussion Leader for the Getty Multicultural Undergraduate Summer Internship Program, and I’m in love. I’ve been aware and a fan of Suzy Lake and Eleanor Antin (She gives off radioactive wisdom, I swear), but Lynn Hershman, who’s transformation into faux-person Roberta Brietman in the 1970’s arouses deep questions about the people of that era, especially the phenomenon of urban disassociation, was totally new to me.
So while WACK! was like some curatorial black hole, unfathomably complex and stretched into directions that seem beyond the understanding of viewers who aren’t experts on the era and theme, Identity Theft is focused and direct, showcasing the brutally accessible works of three of this century’s more curious artists. It came as such a relief to see a show that means something come out of an institution in Los Angeles. Lately, every museum show I’ve looked at in my hometown has seemed distant and inaccessible.
Each artist in Identity Theft seems to approach their work from a disaffected angle, with a mental rawness that could only be addressed by engaging in a radical experiment of self. The show, because of its narrow focus, becomes a deep questioning of our relationship to self, and our desires to escape or grow beyond ourselves. Looking trough the show, I got what I was so angrily missing in WACK! - historical perspective, insight into the art makers themselves and a sufficient volume of work by each artist to have some understanding of their career.
Asides - Icberg: Richard Carter and Margaret Pezalla-Granlund in Project Room I at SMMOA is solid, and not to be missed. There’s a “fine food and wine” pairing in the show that really sucks you in. Also, after we visited SMMOA, we stopped by Patrick Painter to chat about career options with one of his assistants, who standing in the middle of the white box, surrounded by subtle German art gave us a really enlightening talk, while her spaniel dangled at the end of its leash. She was great, but I found the contrast between the non-profit troopers at SMMOA and the “art world” dealer to be so simultaneously jarring, amusing and stereotypical as to be almost completely absurd. At the end of the day I stepped into Mark Moore to see Ultrasonic International II - there’s a great sculture/found object in the form of a wheezing/moaning inflatable Bob’s Big Boy (Ozymandias Weeps, by Chad Person) that is crammed almost floor-to-ceiling in the corner of the room, I could spend all day with that piece.
I woke up this morning, and surfing the artwaves, I noticed that the show that’s on my mind is on the mind of others, as well. Tyler Green at Modern Art notes has some criticism of Emma Gray’s LA Confidential write up of Identity Theft, which I have to agree with - no one is being trumped here. Not that I’m expecting great wit from what is essentially a collection of briefs about LA art, but Emma is right in directing her praise to Identity Theft. Green also draws further attention to the apparent ongoing death of the relevance of the New York art press (Green focuses on the NYT, but I think the same criticism could be directed at most of the NY magazine press, and directly into the curatorial department of MOMA, If you care to know my opinion) - like our president, they’ve chosen to view the world through the rose coloured glasses of their own invented and self-serving interpretation of history.
