Art review: Urs Fischer at Gagosian Gallery

Urs Fischer’s exhibition at Gagosian Gallery is a big disappointment. Titled “Beds & Problem Paintings,” it feels as if it’s been phoned in. Worse, its lackadaisical attitude is at odds with the spare-no-expense production of its slick, custom-made objects.

While effort, hard work and thoughtfulness are not the only ingredients that go into a work of art, they are almost entirely absent from Fisher’s pompous pieces.

The three sculptures (one in each of the three first-floor showrooms) are unimaginative rip-offs of works by Charles Ray and Robert Therrien.

Fischer’s two life-size beds are overshadowed by Therrien’s whimsically weird beds, which he has been making for a couple of decades, and Ray’s “Unpainted Sculpture” from 1997, an exact copy, in Fiberglass, of a crashed Pontiac. Fischer’s sculpture that resembles an ordinary wood table likewise borrows too directly from Ray’s 1989 “Tabletop,” which also uses hidden mechanisms to provide special effects.

Fischer’s preposterously big pictures, on nearly 12-by-8 foot aluminum panels, are portraits of people whose faces can’t be seen because they are blocked by images of disproportionally large objects: a sliced chile pepper, a mushroom and a steel bolt that appears to have wilted. Fischer’s men are pushed into the background by similarly Freudian stand-ins for their genitals: a mushy banana, an uprooted turnip and a steel screw that seems to have been made in the same place as Salvador Dali’s melting clocks or Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures.

In Fischer’s hands, tragedy is bypassed as history is immediately repeated as farce.

 -- David Pagel

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Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, (310) 271-9400, through April 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.gagosian.com

 Image: Urs Fischer exhibition at Gagosian Gallery. Credit: Mats Nordman

Art review: Robert Therrien at Gagosian Gallery

Robert Therrien’s exhibition at Gagosian Gallery takes visitors into the artist’s studio — not literally, by re-creating its architectural details, but by inviting us to go there in our imaginations. This imaginative transport continues all the way into the artist’s head, where we witness ideas, inklings and intuitions being born, taking shape and resonating as they give birth to further visions, memories and sentiments.

In two large galleries, more than 75 long wood tables have been arranged to form a maze. Each of the workbench-style tables is covered with a sheet of thick paper, its buttery-yellowness warming the space.

Atop the paper, Therrien has laid out an impressive inventory of things: black-and-white Polaroids, pen-and-ink drawings, tools and templates, maquettes and mementos, souvenirs and studies, snapshots and sculptures.

Some of the sculptures are tiny: cast bronze snail shells, the silhouette of a country chapel. Most are small: a doll-size coffin, a streamlined oilcan. A few are big: a tower of giant plates, a life-size sidewalk and five beds, whose metal frames have been twisted into a spiral.

Too big for the tables, two sculptures stand alone. One, an exact copy of the corner of a dining room table, is tall enough for adults to walk under. The other, a stainless steel wire beard in a latticed shipping crate, recalls caged beasts from monster movies and children’s nightmares.

Therrien’s installation is a judicious mixture of finished pieces and the step-by-step processes that brought them into existence. It demystifies creativity without getting rid of the magic because it treats the artist’s studio as a down-to-earth workshop, a pedestrian place where the commitment to making things with one’s hands is the first step in getting the heads and the hearts of visitors into the action.

— David Pagel

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Oct. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.gagosian.com

 Image: Robert Therrien, installation view. Credit: Gagosian Gallery

Art review: Eight artists at Gagosian Gallery

 
 
An untitled exhibition at Gagosian Gallery invites visitors to improvise. That’s a nice shift in emphasis.

In America, artists are often called upon to do the improvisatory work. Viewers are meant to sit back and follow the moves the artists have made. In this eight-artist exhibition, the tables are turned: You’re responsible for making meaning — for creating connections, cultivating relationships and construing poetry among the 13 works.

One of the best things about the exhibition is that it doesn’t require you to make sense of every piece. Pleasure — not completion or thoroughness or inclusivity — is the point of improvisation, and some of the most satisfying instances leave out more than they include. Quality and quantity often work at cross-purposes.

Andy Warhol’s “Silver Clouds,” Pierre Huyghe’s “Les Grandes Ensembles” and Yayoi Kusama’s “Passing Winter” stand out for their efficiency. With startling clarity, casual virtuosity and graceful savvy, these Pop masterpieces compress loads of emotional complexity into simple setups. All make you happy to be alive — not only alert to your surroundings but in tune with the invisible rhythms pulsing through them.

Warhol’s 26 helium-filled sculptures, drifting around a gallery, break Minimalism’s stranglehold on heavy-duty significance by making a virtue of lightweight materials, airy reveries and cheap artifice.

Huyghe’s black-and-white video, projected in a darkened gallery and accompanied by a dramatic score, depicts a pair of modern apartment towers on a stormy night. Various lights in various windows go on and off, sometimes slowly, as if in real time, and at other times swiftly and in unison with others, as if composed by the artist. Playing the beauty of randomness against the beauty of meticulously arranged patterns, this mesmerizing piece occupies a world big enough for both.

In the next gallery, Kusama’s sculpture is a mirrored box with two or three peepholes in each of its sides and on its top. The magic happens when you look into one of the openings and see that what’s inside takes up infinitely more space than what’s outside, where you happen to be standing. Turning the world inside out, Kusama’s accessible piece makes your body shrink and your mind expand as it conveys the sensation of an out-of-body experience.

The other works, by Aaron Curry, Carsten Holler, Richard Wright and collaborators Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, function like planets that orbit the trio of suns. They elaborate on experiences delivered by Warhol, Huyghe and Kusama, allowing visitors to customize our improvisations.

-- David Pagel 

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Sept. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.gagosian.com

Images, from top: Yayoi Kusama’s “Passing Winter”; Andy Warhol’s “Silver Clouds." Credit: Gagosian Gallery

Art review: Elliott Hundley at Regen Projects II

Two years ago, Elliott Hundley’s second solo show in Los Angeles took visitors on a mind-boggling journey filled with enough emotional turbulence to last a lifetime—or two. Starting with junk-picked detritus, thrift-store leftovers and glossy snapshots of friends posing like B-movie extras, the young artist’s madly cobbled collages (in two and three dimensions) borrowed scenes from Euripides’ “Hekabe” to capture the tenor of our times: a dirty stew in which tragedy and farce have curdled, leaving individuals to our own devices, sorry and otherwise.

At Regen Projects II, Hundley’s new exhibition, inspired by Euripides’ “The Bacchae,” is even more magnificent — and no less conflicted. Its torment, aimed inward, replaces the theatrical rage of much public speech with the doubt-laced anxiety of a self-reflective consciousness pondering its place in the world. Everyman ordinariness and divine omnipotence commingle, confusing viewers who want their art clear and simple.

At once delicate and powerful, trashy and sublime, each of Hundley’s three mural-size wall reliefs, three skeletal sculptures and two spatially fractured paintings appears to be a world that, once upon a time, was complete unto itself but has imploded, blowing jagged fragments every which way.

The inventory of things in Hundley’s wall reliefs is unremarkable: ink-jet prints, cut-up snapshots, ransom-note lettering, sequins, pins, string and old-fashioned magnifying lenses. But what Hundley does with these mundane materials is inspiring.

Using his skills as a colorist and his acumen as a decorator, not to mention his labor-intensive devotion as a dyed-in-the-wool hobbyist, he builds sophisticated compositions that hum, pulse and throb with electrifying energy. Abstraction and figuration work in concert.

It’s impossible to see Hundley’s huge, densely detailed works from one place or angle. Each is 9 feet tall and 16-, 20- or 24 feet long. And each contains tens of thousands of distinct, often one-of-a-kind components.

From afar, each of the three masterpieces seems to be a digital version of a Cubist collage. Space and time collapse and expand, catching you in the emotional undertow. Up close, exquisite details and sexy vignettes accumulate, suggesting inescapable, wildly satisfying diversions.

But Hundley never lets you get lost in such pleasures, which are great — just not all-consuming. Instead, his gigantic constellations forge connections across time and space, linking actions to consequences, individuals to groups, moments to histories.

His freestanding sculptures and freewheeling paintings similarly stitch together far-flung elements, fashioning Frankenstein-style hybrids at once organic and artificial, emaciated and weighty, cultivated and vulgar. In Hundley’s hands, a 2,500-year-old story of lust, betrayal, revenge, torture, murder and religious duty comes alive to shed chilling light on the present. That never gets old.

-- David Pagel

Regen Projects II, 9016 Santa Monica Blvd., L.A., (310) 276-5424, through July 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.regenprojects.com

Images: Top, Elliott Hundley's "the high house low!"; bottom, Hundley's "a foot against his ribs." Credit: From Regen Projects.

Theater review: 'Nazi Hunter -- Simon Wiesenthal' at Theatre 40

A phone book can bring down a fascist in the hands of the right detective. The dogged pursuit of justice drives “Nazi Hunter -– Simon Wiesenthal,” the compelling one-man show written and performed by Tom Dugan, now at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills. Austro-Hungarian Wiesenthal, who tracked down 1,100 war criminals in his 60-year career, was often called the Jewish James Bond. But according to Dugan’s portrait, he was really more of a Columbo, using his targets’ mistakes and arrogance to ensnare them.

Dugan and director Jenny Sullivan structure this accessible history lesson with contrasting narratives: the sweep of Wiesenthal’s life as a victim and then a hunter of Nazis; and his last day running Vienna’s Jewish Documentation Center, where he struggles to bring one more fugitive war criminal a step closer to extradition. (The specific details of Wiesenthal’s tradecraft are among the show’s best moments, like the Nazi directory that led to the man who arrested Anne Frank and family.)

Along with breathless episodes in Argentina, the Warsaw Ghetto and an Israeli courtroom awaiting Adolf Eichmann’s trial, Dugan occasionally takes us to the Catskills for some folksy audience participation. Still, the writer-performer keeps it reasonably unsentimental as he recounts the horrors and triumphs of an astonishing life. Recent research has uncovered inconsistencies in Wiesenthal’s autobiography, and Dugan doesn’t shy away from his subject’s flaws, or his ego. But there are righteous stories told here that you will not forget. That is the show’s achievement.  

--Charlotte Stoudt

“Nazi Hunter — Simon Wiesenthal,” Theatre 40 at the Ruben Cordova Theatre, 241 S. Moreno Drive, Beverly Hills. 7:30 p.m. Sundays through Tuesdays. Ends June 21. No performance May 30 and June 5. $25.  (310) 364-3606, www.theatre40.org. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Photo: Tom Dugan as Simon Wiesenthal. Credit: Ed Krieger

Music review: Itzhak Perlman and Cantor Yitzchok Meir Helfgot in 'The Soul Of Jewish Music' at the Saban Theatre

Itzhak Perlman performances are usually arranged well in advance, but his concert Wednesday night was patched together in a matter of weeks.  It was a benefit for the Bet Tzedek Holocaust Survivors Justice Network, “The Soul of Jewish Music,” at the Saban Theatre in which the great violinist resumed his exploration of his roots.  

Perlman has done something like this before -– and rather convincingly –- with no less than four different klezmer revival bands on a pair of CDs and a video in 1995-96 (now reissued as a three-disc package, “Perlman Plays Klezmer,” on EMI).  For this concert he added the Jewish cantorial tradition to the mix in the person of Israel’s Cantor Yitzchok Meir Helfgot, plus a chamber orchestra augmenting members of Boston’s Klezmer Conservatory Band.      

It was a juxtaposition of concert-hall dignity and mad populist exuberance, with the partisan audience rhythmically clapping along at the slightest provocation.  Perlman’s presence amounted to luxury-class casting -– and indeed, not only did he sound comfortable with the tiny glides and assorted appoggiatura of Jewish music, his playing in general was smoother and more even than it has been recently.  There was also some room for the irrepressible showman to tell a few jokes. 

Art review: Ed Ruscha at Gagosian Gallery

Nine of Ed Ruscha’s 10 new paintings at Gagosian Gallery don’t look like anything he has made over his prolific, 50-year career. The single canvas that most closely resembles any of the 73-year-old’s previous works — a panoramic image of snow-capped mountains rising up behind a crumpled Bud Lite beer carton — lacks the uncanny magic that is Ruscha’s trademark.

This paradox goes to the heart of his art, which is all about stripped-down simplicity, intangible atmosphere and the tendency for appearances to deceive yet still tell the truth.

Ruscha specializes in Minimalist enigmas, humble conundrums both frustrating and fascinating. Think of his works as the visual equivalent of those maddening moments when speech comes up short and all you are able to say is that a word got stuck on the tip of your tongue — where it remains out of reach.

The nine knockout paintings in “Pscyho Spaghetti Westerns” are long horizontals: 9-, 10- and 11-feet-long canvases that depict roadside trash. In most, the horizon line is low, often angled at a steep pitch. Tire treads, plastic bottles, cardboard boxes, mattresses and broken signs perch perfectly on the border between earth and sky.

Strict Realism gives way to loose drama. The horizons seem to list, like sea-going vessels in distress. Strange tales spin free as the various bits of litter seem to teeter-totter, their weight and volume driving home the point that these unresolved compositions are part of unsolved mysteries.

One of Ruscha’s favorite tricks is to make things so obvious that viewers don’t notice them. That happens in this quietly confounding series of extremely abbreviated landscapes when Realism comes back into focus.

The world only looks like it does in these paintings when you’re flat on your face on the side of the road, too weary or knocked out of your senses to raise your head to get a level perspective.

That’s a lot to take in, especially at a show that’s as attractive as this one. Ruscha makes it work by not forcing the issue and leaving everything to the power of suggestion.

-- David Pagel

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through April 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.gagosian.com.

Image: Ed Ruscha, "Psycho Spaghetti Western #5." Credit: From Gagosian Gallery.

Historic Beverly Hills Post Office is finally ready for its makeover as Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

The future is finally in sight for the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. Construction will begin soon at its location, the historic Beverly Hills Post Office. Doors will open in 2013, organizers say.

The center, named for its largest donor, the TV Guide heiress, has been in the planning stages for a decade and a half. Ground on the parking lot was broken last March, but this April’s construction start will be the first work on the center’s theater space itself, which will include the extension of a well-preserved 1930s former post office on North Canon Drive.

Instead of expanding the Italian Renaissance-style post office itself, architect Zoltan Pali of Culver City’s SPF:architects, has designed a separate 500-seat theater with variable acoustics. The Annenberg Center will offer performances of theater, music, dance, small operas and professional children’s theater.

Click here to read the full story on the plans for Beverly Hills' coming arts center.

Architectural rendering of the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts by SPF:architects