By Jonathan Griffin
James Turrell, Akhob (2013)
Jonathan Griffinis a contributing editor of frieze and a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.
I’m just going to have to assume that, even if you didn’t actually see either ‘The Encyclopaedic Palace’ at the Venice Biennale or the 2013 Carnegie International, you’ve already formed your own critical opinions of both and, like me, you deem them to be, on the whole, excellent. Ditto Rachel Kushner’s blazing novel The Flamethrowers. Good.
If you live in the USA you probably also saw a James Turrell show somewhere in 2013. You may not have seen, however, the Turrell installation that is currently viewable (by appointment) on the fourth floor of the Louis Vuitton store in Crystals, the luxury Las Vegas shopping mall. Despite its risible location, Akhob is, astonishingly, an even finer Ganzfeld environment than the one currently drawing crowds at LACMA’s retrospective. As over-exposed and uneven as Turrell may be right now (and his cluttered and half-hearted Vegas monorail station, a few feet from Louis Vuitton, is a dispiriting case in point), it would be disingenuous of me not to acknowledge Akhob as a highlight of my year, as Turrell on his A-game remains pretty hard to beat.
Judith Bernstein, Fucked by Number (1967/2013), installation view, ‘Keep Your Timber Limber’, ICA London, 2013
A bracing tonic to Turrell’s sublime metaphysics, if one were needed, could be found in Judith Bernstein’s ‘Cuntface’ paintings, shown in September at The Box, Los Angeles. In year of outstanding shows at this gallery, the 71-year old Bernstein’s large scale day-glo depictions of angry genitalia howling in cosmic space were hard to forget: a sight for sore eyes and a boost for a weary soul. Equally indelicate was Bernstein’s giant charcoal drawing Fucked by Number (1967/2013) in Sarah McCrory’s riotously sexy show ‘Keep Your Timber Limber’ at the ICA, London. Joyce Pensato, another ornery septuagenarian New Yorker, put timid younger artists to shame with her solo exhibition of new enamel paintings and site-specific charcoal wall drawings at Santa Monica Museum of Art titled, for no good reason, ‘I Killed Kenny’.
It’s hard to believe it has only been a year since formerly scrappy artist-run space Night Gallery relocated to spanking new and enlarged premises in an unprepossessing area south of Downtown Los Angeles. After an elegant inaugural exhibition by recent grad Sean Townley, their programme really kicked into gear with the feel-good So-Cal survey that was the group show ‘Made in Space’, curated by Laura Owens (as if she didn’t have enough on her plate having just unveiled the show of her career in a specially reconnoitred warehouse studio-cum-ongoing project space) and fellow artist Peter Harkawik.
‘Made in Space’, 2013, installation view, Night Gallery, Los Angeles
For ‘Made in Space’, Owens and Harkawik convened some unexpected, cultish oldsters (Peter Shire, Eric Orr, Derek Boshier and Marcia Hafif among them) as well as younger names who, one feels, were this New York, would have already sold out several solo shows by now. But if this were New York, the show seemed to argue, they wouldn’t be making this work in the first place. Josh Mannis, John Seal, Joshua Callaghan and Patrick Jackson were among the most memorable.
Patrick Jackson, by the way, currently has the must-see show in Culver City: a three-level installation in the oddly-proportioned gallery that Francois Ghebaly opened next to a car muffler shop in 2010. Ghebaly has now relocated to a huge building next to Night Gallery, but before he says goodbye to Culver City for good, Jackson has staged what is probably the best show in the space’s history. A false floor fixes an idiosyncratic architectural feature of the gallery and provides a Saturnalian underfloor space through which visitors can clamber, stooped, to inspect Jackson’s splendidly ugly giant mugs and other ceramic vessels. Up on a mezzanine, overlooking the main space, a realistic but jet black figure of a child stares down out of frighteningly empty eye sockets.
I hope it is not disloyal to my adopted city to admit that my favourite show of the year might well have been ‘GANG BUST’, featuring paintings by William Copley and Bjarne Melgaard, at Venus over Manhattan in New York. Melgaard curated the show under the aegis of his quasi-corporate alter-ego Big Fat Black Cock Inc. (Sorry if you’re reading this, Mum.) Copley’s extraordinary paintings from the 1950s–80s were hung along with Melgaard’s contemporary homages to CPLY (as he signed his work) on walls emulating the ones on which Copley installed paintings by Man Ray and Max Ernst when he opened a gallery in Beverly Hills in 1948. It closed after six months and Copley sold almost nothing. But that’s another story.