Going 'Incognito' at the Santa Monica Museum of Art

Put on your running shoes: Saturday brings the eighth edition of "Incognito," the Santa Monica Museum of Art’s popular annual fundraiser, when hundreds of patrons line up hours early, so that when the museum opens for the event, they can race toward artwork that catches their eye.

One lays claim to an artwork by taking a numbered tag to the cashier. At $350 a pop, you could be buying a John Baldesarri, Jo Ann Callis, Tony DeLap, John Outterbridge, Betye Saar or Jennifer Steinkamp – or, among out-of-towners, Judy Chicago, Milton Glaser or Yoko Ono.  You won’t know till after you’ve purchased the work – the identity of the artist is on the back.

“People have to trust their instincts to buy what they like,” says Elsa Longhauser, the museum’s executive director.

This year there will be a record number of 700 works available from 500 artists, in a range of media from drawings, prints, photography and painting to sculpture and video.  All are in an 8 by 10 inch format, except for sculptures, which vary in size. 

"We’re very careful about inviting artists, it’s curated," Longhauser says. "People feel proud to be in 'Incognito' and are careful to give us wonderful work.”

The basic admission is $100 (or $150 at the door), which also provides food and drink. Those who prefer to avoid the rush can come the next day (Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.) for the Second Opportunity Art Sale; admission is $10 or free for museum members.

For more information go to www.smmoa.org.

--Scarlet Cheng

Photo: The scene at the 2010 edition of the Santa Monica Museum of Art's Incognito. Credit: Steve Cohn Photography

Art review: Kelly Barrie at the Santa Monica Museum of Art

Kelly Barrie’s Project Room show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art consists of a single stunning picture called “Mirror House.” Its genesis is complicated and fascinating, beginning with a haunting newspaper photograph taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Barrie "walked the image out of his mind" by articulating its subjects in photo-luminescent pigment on black paper, using his feet. He then photographed the drawing more than 70 times — by its own light, stored in the pigment — and digitally montaged those images together to create one seamless, deeply evocative print.

Remarkably, the how of the image’s making doesn’t overwhelm the what. “Mirror House” is a gorgeous hybrid, reading at once as drawing, blueprint and photographic trace. The muscular trunk and branches of a tree dominate the foreground, screening the view of a house in skeletal outline. Both stand in floodwater, which can’t be seen as much as deduced by the reflection’s doubling effect.

Values are reversed and the field is largely bluish-black, but the image looks less like a negative than a ghostly nightscape, the tree a dance of milk-white streaks and smears, the house a pale, bony memory. Powdery scatters abut fluid smudges. Dense opacity yields to filmy translucence. Barrie, London-born and living in L.A., builds a tremendous textural and emotional richness through his inventive process — part gestural performance, part documentation, an alliance of physical presence and temporal retreat.

-- Leah Ollman

Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 586-6488, through Dec. 10. www.smmoa.org

Image: Kelly Barrie, "Mirror House." Credit: Santa Monica Museum of Art

Art review: 'Beatrice Wood' at the Santa Monica Museum of Art

In the annals of understatement, to say that Beatrice Wood was a late bloomer ranks right up there with saying Bill Gates is rich and Lady Gaga likes clothes. She was well into her 60s when her luxurious, luster-glazed earthenware vessels made Wood a potter to reckon with -- one of the most distinctive and compelling of the last half-century. A lovely exhibition, part of Pacific Standard Time, at the Santa Monica Museum of Art does a good job of putting her work into the context of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Southern California artists working with clay shook up complacent expectations.

Wood's luster ware is frankly bizarre -- strange, whimsical, serious, gorgeous, preposterous, technically astute and several other deep-seated contradictions. All happily coexist in functional objects that would turn an ordinary dinner table into a charged landscape of almost carnal desire, if not a cartoon banquet. The show's roughly 70 examples survey a variety of ceramic forms, including platters, bottles, tea sets and, the weakest, figurative clay sculptures.

However, Wood's signature form is the chalice, which might be called a drinking cup with pretensions. The configuration of a cupped vessel raised aloft on its own built-in pedestal yields an inescapably sacramental edge, whether she deemed it a chalice or a footed bowl, urn or goblet. Sometimes looped handles -- a pair, four loops, even 10 of them on a single pot -- connect the cup to its pedestal. Like bent elbows, they stabilize the construction while lending a slight figurative cast to the ritualistically tinged object.

Notably, Wood was by no means interested in perfecting these forms. She did throw them on a potter's wheel, but the chalices are always irregular, organic, often wobbly and sometimes downright lumpy.

PST, A to Z: 'Beatrice Wood: Career Woman' at Santa Monica museum

Pacific Standard Time will explore the origins of the Los Angeles art world through museum exhibitions throughout Southern California over the next six months. Times art reviewer Sharon Mizota has set the goal of seeing all of them. This is her latest report.

 
The Beatrice Wood retrospective at the Santa Monica Museum of Art is a delightful, sparkly gem of a show. Perhaps the most glittery collection of ceramics ever assembled, it is a fitting tribute to a woman with an equally glitzy history and an irrepressible joie de vivre. (Read Jori Finkel’s feature story for the details, including Wood’s close relationship with Marcel Duchamp. And keep an eye out for Christopher Knight’s full exhibition review.)

The show, which is part of Pacific Standard Time, also includes Wood’s drawings and correspondence, which are less audacious than her ceramics but no less charming. One letter, folded like a greeting card, contains drawings of two alternate realities: On one side, a flirtatious woman in a low cut dress winks emphatically at a man; on the other, the same woman wears a more demure ensemble and is accompanied by a chaperone who allows her to speak only to women. This duality captures Wood’s frustration with the Victorian mores with which she was raised, although the woman’s wink can hardly be described as salacious. Exaggerated and cartoony, it bespeaks girlish playfulness more than lust.

Art review: 'Marco Brambilla: The Dark Lining' at Santa Monica Museum of Art

 

 "Sea of Tranquility," the hypnotizing single-channel video at the start of the Marco Brambilla survey exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, is and isn't what its title says. A dramatic, silvery landscape does show the famous broad plain of that name on the Earth's moon; to see it, however, leaves a viewer anything but tranquil.

The Sea of Tranquility is the site where Apollo 11, the American manned lunar module, touched down in July 1969. The first time Earth-bound humans stepped onto another natural satellite, the event also marked the climax of the furious "space race" between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Brambilla's three-minute computer-generated video is a time-lapse study of the landing craft, the Eagle, and the American flag that the crew planted beside it. The artist started with an image first broadcast on television, removed voices from the original radio transmissions to create a crackling soundtrack of static, beeps and buzzes, then compressed time to show the Eagle and the flag disintegrating into rubble and tatters. Days, even years, zoom by in speeding flashes of traveling sunlight.

This gorgeously aestheticized picture of natural decay is overlaid with poignant spiritual reverberations -- ashes to ashes, dust to dust -- while speaking of socio-cultural transformations as well. An astounding human accomplishment goes to rack and ruin, as surely as the Parthenon fell from breathtaking utilitarian grace into a poetic shambles.

Brambilla is a Romantic poet here, as obsessed with wreckage as Wordsworth and Shelley were in writing, or Piranesi and J.M.W. Turner in pictures.

Marco Brambilla, in town for show at Santa Monica Museum of Art, reflects on Kanye West's power

“The Dark Lining” at the Santa Monica Museum of Art represents Marco Brambilla's biggest museum exhibition to date as well as the first public showing of his new 3D video “Evolution.” But it doesn’t include the video he made that got the most small-screen play last year: his music video for Kanye West’s hit “Power" (shown above).

Curator Lisa Melandri says, “I actually never considered [including] it, because I felt it was Marco’s vision in the service of a particular product as opposed to completely an autonomous artwork. You’re given the music and given the personality, Kanye West, and I don’t think of it as the same process.”

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.

RELATED:

Review: Alberto Burri at the Santa Monica Museum of Art

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

Art review: 'Al Taylor: Wire Instruments and Pet Stains' at the Santa Monica Museum of Art

Making mountains of molehills has become something of a national pastime. We all do it, every time we tell exaggerated stories about otherwise pedestrian exploits.

 Many artists excel at these shenanigans, making works that pretend to be more than they are. Their hyped-up hybrids are so adept at multi-tasking that they seem to be striving to be all things to all people.

At the Santa Monica Museum of Art, a refreshingly levelheaded exhibition sticks a pin into the pompous nonsense that defines a big part of life in the digital phase of the Information Age. “Al Taylor: Wire Instruments and Pet Stains” is a terrifically unpretentious exploration of the honest pleasures and modest delights that can be found in the mundane materials and tried-and-true gestures of drawing.

Organized by Director Elsa Longhauser and curator Lisa Melandri, the smartly focused show features 46 pieces that Taylor (1948-1999) made from 1989 to 1992. Nearly three-fourths are small, framed works on paper. Eleven others, which rest on the floor or hang on the wall, combine various lengths of unpainted wood with variously shaped sheets of Plexiglas and strands of loosely strung wire. Nearly all are adorned with basic marks made with graphite, ink and grease pencil, as well as gouache, watercolor, latex, enamel, wax crayon, typewriter correction fluid, Xerographic toner, solvent, coffee and tea.

No matter the materials, all of Taylor’s pieces are all about drawing.

Drawing, with an emphatically small ‘d,’ is Taylor’s specialty — not puffed-up Drawing-as-Sculpture, Drawing-as-Painting or Drawing-as-Installation; just plain, flat-footed drawing, which, in his hands, turns out to be anything but plain or flat-footed.

One of the best things about Taylor’s subtly inventive works is that there is nothing traditional, back-to-basics or stick-in-the-mud about them.

Art review: 'Andrew Lord: Selected Works,1990-2010' at Santa Monica Museum of Art

The Bible is pretty straightforward about the moment when human life begins, and it isn't at conception. Genesis 2:7 is unambiguous: "And the lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul."

I was thinking of those lines from Genesis the other day while looking at the gorgeous Andrew Lord exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Lord, despite the surname, produces thoroughly secular sculpture. The show includes 27 works from five series, most completed in the last dozen years, plus a short video. But humanity's spiritual mystery courses through it all.

Lord usually makes ceramics. Clay -- the "dust of the ground" -- is his primary material. He breathes remarkable life into the human qualities that, since ancient times, have been attached to ceramic vessels.

Most any clay vessel has a mouth, lip, neck, body and foot, and the use of bodily terminology is not accidental. Lord regards those body parts quite literally -- not by making forms that necessarily describe them but through highlighting the sense of touch. He even uses his body, as well as his hands, to push, squeeze and mold the vessels. The forms can appear crude on initial encounter, but they grow sophisticated, even elegant, the longer you linger.

Take my picture, Leonard Nimoy

Over at the Hero Complex blog, Geoff Boucher talks with Leonard Nimoy about his lifelong passion for photography, which is coming into focus Saturday night at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

Nimoy, an avid art collector along with his wife, Susan, is unveiling his latest project, called "Who Do You Think You Are?," at a Halloween fundraiser the couple is hosting for the museum. The event will include installations by Miriam Wosk, music by DJ Eddie Ruscha (son of Ed) and a prize drawing.

Tickets for the costume party start at $350. For $5,000 and up (and one lucky drawing winner), Nimoy will take a portrait of you at the event in the theme of his project, which Boucher explains thusly:

Last year, Nimoy spent two 16-hour days shooting portraits of total strangers in Northampton, Mass., who had answered a public invitation to share a glimpse of their hidden selves. He photographed 95 people and chose 25 of them for the exhibit that will go on display next summer at MASS MoCA.

"The idea was to invite people to reveal their secret selves, the self they wish to be or the self they hide from the world," said Nimoy, 78, who has been an avid photographer since his youth. "There was a measure of bravery in this by everyone involved. I had no idea what to expect. Some of the people walked in with these amazing stories, stories you couldn't anticipate or make up."

To find out what some of those stories are, click here.

-- Scott Sandell

Photo: Leonard Nimoy at home with two of his works. Credit: Christina House / For The Times