Incognito, coming to Santa Monica Museum of Art, keeps art world on its toes

 
Can you tell the difference between a witty drawing by John Baldessari and a smart-aleck knockoff in 10 seconds? How fast can you spot a work by  Kristin Calabrese or Jennifer Steinkamp? The Santa Monica Museum of Art is at it again Saturday night with its seventh edition of Incognito, the annual museum fundraiser that feels a bit like a Japanese game show designed to mess with jaded art-world types.

You know, the types who tend to  look at wall labels and signatures before artworks.  But at this collecting event, there are no such maker/market identifiers -- just hundreds of artworks on display. You must buy a work to find out that artist’s name, testing your ability to recognize local artists, your ability to recognize what you like -- or both.

The good news: With all works sized the same, 8 by 10 inches, and priced the same, $300 each, the experience tends to feel pretty democratic, which is to say mobbed. The good-for-some news: To make the most of the fundraiser, the museum has over the years created more levels of access to this event. So those who pay a higher ticket price get the chance to “preview” the sale beforehand and enter the main event first.

Tickets this year range from $100 for event entry (or $600 for entry for two, including one voucher for an artwork and earlier entrance to the event) all the way up to $10,000, which includes six event tickets, six preview invitations, four artwork vouchers, dinner for six at a restaurant partner, a visit to the home of Lari Pittman and Roy Dowell, and — what might seem most valuable of all — parking for two cars at Bergamot Station.

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For 10 years, Elsa Longhauser has put her imprint on the Santa Monica Museum of Art

--Jori Finkel
www.twitter.com/jorifinkel

Photo: Will Kopelman and Kevin Turen rush to see Incognito in 2010 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Credit: Steve Cohn

What do Eli Broad and Mike Kelley have in common? Power, says ArtReview

If the art world were a horse race, then the annual power lists that art magazines generate toward the end of year would really matter. Who placed and who didn't? Who inched ahead of whom? Which dark horse upset the race?

But seeing that the art world is only part horse race, it's hard to know exactly how to take rankings such as ArtReview's newly released Power 100 for 2010. Except as amusement, or maybe as shorthand for some of the year's most inescapable (not to say inevitable) trends.

According to this year's list, and almost every critic in the country, 2010 was the year that performance art went mainstream. Hence Performa founder RoseLee Goldberg (No. 9) and art star Marina Abramovic (35) climbed the list, and the elusive event-based artist Tino Sehgal (44) makes his debut.

In 2010 Jerry Saltz reached the point of near-ubiquity, thanks to his run on Bravo's "Work of Art" and free-for-alls with Facebook friends, on top of his New York magazine reviews. So this year the anonymous judges behind the list gave Saltz (75) the edge over his wife, New York Times critic Roberta Smith (80).

It was also a year in which L.A.'s most prominent collector, Eli Broad (8) made news on several counts, first for helping to bring Jeffrey Deitch (12) on board as MOCA's new director and then for firming up plans to open his own museum next door.

The other L.A. choices:

Art Review: "Linguistic Turn" at Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art

“Linguistic Turn” is among the freshest and funniest shows of the season—not just the summer doldrums of dime-a-dozen group shows, but the whole year. It’s also a terrific addendum to the John Baldessari survey at LACMA, giving visitors a rare glimpse of the atmosphere in which Southern California’s most famous Conceptual artist flourished. In a celebrity culture increasingly obsessed with stars and increasingly ignorant of any kind of surrounding context, that’s downright radical.

To walk into the main gallery at Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art is to feel as if you have stepped into a photograph from a high-end design magazine from about 50 years ago.

The palette, predominantly black and white, is cool. The look—sleek, minimal and restrained—is tasteful. And what each of the 16 artists does in this limited format is wild—a nervy mixture of hilarious irreverence and mind-bending high-jinx that reawakens any literate person’s awareness of the role communication plays in civilizing animals like us. In this delightfully intelligent exhibition, laughter is a joking matter and a whole lot more.

Russell Baldwin’s pair of language-based works from the mid-1970s sets the tone. The first is a framed glass panel into which has been sandblasted “This is a unique work especially created by Russell Baldwin to be placed above a simple sofa covered in white-on-white linen fabric woven in a sculpted geometric pattern.” In the gallery, that is just what has been done: a comfy sofa, flanked by matching end tables and lamps, sits beneath the glass panel.

Baldwin’s second piece consists of four rectangular canvases hung in a grid. On each is painted part of the phrase: “This work of art is so [expletive deleted] good that it was sold immediately.” Each panel also sports a snapshot of the four panels together.

Both of Baldwin’s pieces begin with the wisdom that works of art have lives outside the artist’s studio, in the homes of the people who use them. It doesn’t take a great leap to imagine someone hanging the sandblasted piece over a plaid sofa, a desk or a table. Or the four parts of the other piece going to four different collectors, their reunion in the future a mere possibility.

Story telling is alive and well in the show’s multilayered, endlessly fascinating standouts. Nancy Buchanan’s “Wolfwoman”  is a wicked little whimsy that is entertaining, playful and pointed. Sol LeWitt’s pair of notebook pages, covered with instructions for making and installing a wall drawing, is a through-the-looking-glass game of infinite regress that pushes rationality to the breaking point. It gives concise form to the profound differences between experiencing things in the flesh and reading about them in books while also demonstrating that every once in a while seeing things in the mind’s-eye is even more powerful than seeing them in reality.

Other wonderful conundrums are set up by John Knight’s detailed dissection of standardized spaces and their incidental differences; Doug Edge’s industrial-strength doorstop that talks back to viewers; Merwin Bellin’s playful mockery of insider knowledge; Lawrence Weiner’s miniature demonstration of the differences between words and objects; and Phel Steinmetz’s photograph that makes a place for comedy in art and in life.

That’s a lesson lost on a lot of the art from the 1970s, not to mention the present.

--David Pagel

Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, 8568 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 815-1100, through Sept. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.cardwelljimmerson.com

Images: Russell Baldwin, Untitled, 1977, sand-blasted glass in metal frame; Nancy Buchanan, Wolfwoman, 1977, (detail) black-and-white photograph; and Merwin Bellin Untitled (Just a Friend), 1973, paper collage. All courtesy of Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art

This contemporary art really is laughable

Ever since Marcel Duchamp put a urinal on a pedestal and signed it with a pseudonym in 1917, artists have been poking fun at the pretensions of the art world. But within the hallowed halls of museums and galleries, you’re more likely to hear stifled chuckles than loud guffaws. 

“The act of laughing is considered kind of a low-class, working-class activity — a form of entertainment — and you know, it’s not something you do in art museums,” says Sheri Klein, author of the book “Art and Laughter.” Because of this association, she says, the role of humor in art is “terribly misunderstood.”

Yet perhaps things are changing. Absurdities of all stripes feature prominently in a number of summer shows by “serious” artists, including John Baldessari’s Los Angeles County Museum of Art retrospective and Mika Rottenberg’s solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Is there perhaps a way to talk about humor and art that doesn’t reduce the work to superficial entertainment? 

Read more in my Sunday Arts & Books feature.

— Sharon Mizota

Photo: Mika Rottenberg's  "Mary Boone with Cube" (2010)

Credit: Mike Rottenberg

On eve of LACMA survey, John Baldessari talks about his history teaching--and past students flash back too

When "Pure Beauty," John Baldessari's retrospective, opens at the L.A. County Museum of Art on June 27, expect to see several generations of artists on hand for the opening-week events.

For as long as he has been making art in Los Angeles, Baldessari has also been, in a less tangible way, making artists: offering suggestions, encouragement and above all conversation to students eager to follow in his footsteps by living a life of art.

Follow they have, with their own gallery shows, museum shows, teaching gigs and some commercial successes that have at times even surpassed their teacher's.

Jack Goldstein, James Welling, Barbara Bloom, David Salle, Matt Mullican, Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, Liz Larner and Meg Cranston are just a few who studied with him at CalArts in the 1970s and '80s. Liz Craft, Mungo Thomson, Karl Haendel, Nathan Mabry, Skylar Haskard, Analia Saban and Elliott Hundley studied with him at UCLA, where he was on faculty until 2007. 

But Baldessari, a conceptual artist with a droll sense of humility, is the last to take credit for any of their accomplishments. “You never really know where students get their nourishment,” he says.

Nor does he glamorize his decision to teach. “I taught because I needed the money — it wasn't a vocational choice,” he says. “I was just trying to make it enjoyable for myself, trying to make it as much like art as possible. Maybe that's why it worked.”

Click here for my Arts & Books story about the artist-teacher. And here for accounts by James Welling, Tony Oursler, Meg Cranston, Elliott Hundley and Analia Saban of the teacher they shared.

You can also read online an "assignment" sheet Baldessari prepared in 1970 for his now-famous post-studio course at CalArts, "just in case anyone needed the structure."

-- Jori Finkel
http://www.twitter.com

A 1972 photograph of a CalArts field trip for project called "Rolling: Tire." From left to right: Dede Bazyk, John Baldessari, Suzanne Kuffler, Matt Mullican and David Trout.

Photograph by James Welling, courtesy Baldessari Studio.