Made in LA Biennial Spotlights Art Stars

A great show, but the catalogue is too La La Land.

T he art-making milieu in Los Angeles is dazzling. Making this point with elan and emphasis is Made in LA 2020, the fifth biennial of work by living artists in this vast, creatively sizzling region. It takes the temperature of Los Angeles’s avant-garde art. It’s hot, to be sure, and what’s good is very good. Fevered at points, too, and I diagnosed delirium, both forgivable, since we live in crazy times.

The exhibition is hosted by the Hammer Museum in Westwood, UCLA’s neighborhood but also a chic, tony enclave between West Hollywood and Santa Monica, and the Huntington Museum in San Marino, about 20 miles and another galaxy away. I saw it at both places last week. Both museums have spacious galleries, so it looks nice. It’s basically two versions of the same show, with the same artists but different objects.

Brandon Landers’s paintings are so good. He lives in Bakersfield, Calif., and teaches art at a grade school there, but he grew up in Los Angeles. He’s a figure painter using brushes but mostly a palette knife to give his work a look of grit, though it isn’t gritty. His scenes are everyday life with friends and family. That’s Landers’s milieu. He’s not from any glam scene. Paintings like Wonders and 1 of 1, both from 2020, are intense but not nervous. His figures are confident and casual and, above all else, real. They’re real bodies living life.

Wonders has a snapshot look. Children are suitably goofy. A man on the left is in mid gesture and both dynamic and rock-steady. A woman on the right is in near swagger-style pose. Landers’s palette isn’t rote. That’s one of the reasons I kept coming back to his work. He uses lots of browns, yellows, blacks, and whites but then paints a big, bright blue passage, a shirt, for instance, or a beer can that’s iridescent, like an emerald-studded orb.

Landers is 36, not well known at all, with no dealer. He’s going to be a star. I hope he stays in Bakersfield. L.A.’s Oz.

Harmony Holiday’s 35-minute film, God’s Suicide, deals mostly with writer James Baldwin’s five suicide attempts, stemming, he says, from a lifetime as “America’s perfect black mascot, broken in places no one knows to ask about.” How depressing. How woeful. After ten minutes, how boring. I think Holiday’s very talented, and I’m always up for heartbreak since that’s a big part of life. The film is what rich white liberals expect to see and, right now, want. It’s Made in LA’s concession to bourgeois desires and values. Boy, that used to be Renoir!

Baldwin died in 1987. While I agree he’s timeless, he’s not of our time, which seems to me unusually difficult and needing an artist’s intervention but with the look and language of today. With thousands of black-on-black murders and black drug deaths, which get no attention, and a dozen police killings a year, which get endless, operatic attention, focusing on a long-dead expatriate writer for whom suicide was a goal seems both boutique and tin-ear to me. And if you’re going to show a long video, you need seating. While I was at the Hammer, people watched snippets, walking away as Baldwin said the same things in different words.

I like video art and think Los Angeles is the pioneer, and rightly so. That said, God’s Suicide seems like an art film that belongs as a double feature with I Am Not Your Negro, the 2016 documentary about Baldwin, or If Beale Street Could Talk, both of which I liked.

It’s not a case of upbeat versus demoralizing and gloomy. Landers paints matter-of-fact scenes. I was overjoyed by his handling of paint. God’s Suicide is both axe-grinding and wheel-spinning. Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room is enlightening to me in thinking about him. To me, sexuality, not so much race, dismantled him.

I love Buck Ellison’s work. He does mostly big-format figure photographs, staging scenes of what he imagines as everyday life among affluent, white WASPs and Ivy League students. They’re a good complement to Landers’s paintings.

Everyday WASP life is a favorite subject for me as I lived in the warped and tattered fringes of it. I indulge it when I imagine, always for a fleeting moment, that in some future life I’ll return as an anorexic. That is, I look at his pitch-perfect blue-eyed blonds with their Ken Doll faces and bland, preppy doings and ever so slightly sicken, though I can’t stop looking. Ellison treats whiteness and privilege, and that’s a bit of a yawn, yawn, but he’s razor-sharp and effective in showing WASP codes.

Dick, Dan, and Doug, the Everglades Club, 1990, from 2019, is a sea of pastels and all male. Golf was once a powerful but leisured way for WASPs to bond. I despised country-club golfers since I remember the casual, subtly homophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic digs sure to come when the guys moved from the golf course to the bar. Ellison captures the thin layer of brutishness under the poised, polite WASP façade. As two golfers contemplate their next move, a third urinates on the lawn. Unexpected, yes, but they’re bores, and bores can be boorish. Dick and Betsy and the Prince Children, Holland, Michigan, revels in the iconography of the right-wing, Dutch-American aristocrats, down to the military-training book and Dutch Reform hymnal to the right of the boy.

Ellison is from a WASP, country-club background, so his work comes from experience and observation. It’s wry and gentle, too, even genteel. He doesn’t go for the jugular. I know, all that blood would make a mess and seem forward and impolite, but not going for the jugular explains why our old WASP rulers aren’t in charge anymore. They lost their nerve.

Fulton Leroy Washington learned to paint in prison, where he served a long term for a nonviolent drug charge commuted by President Obama. Biography aside, his bust portraits exist on the edge of photorealism. He’s a very good painter. The ones on view show celebrities and, I think, fellow prisoners, seeming stoic but with big tears flowing down their cheeks. Inside the tears, he paints a vignette, like a thought bubble, explaining the emotional fissure we’re seeing. In his portrait of Hillary Clinton, it’s then-candidate Obama giving a primary-night victory speech. Are there any Tammy Wynette songs about crying?

Big inflating-blob sculptures by Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon seem a bit too blasé, and Monica Majoli’s woodcut riffs on late-1970s gay news magazines are too decorative. Aria Dean’s large Les Simulacres is a group of drawings on the wall by the Hammer’s big staircase. They’re based on early Renaissance Dance of Death woodcuts digitally manipulated by Dean into shapes that grow more and more abstract as the wall ascends. Starting a biennial with a downer probably isn’t a good idea.

Nicola L., well, there’s a heavy hitter. Made in LA 2020 certainly embraces a broad cross-section of humanity. Nicola died in Los Angeles in 2019 at 81. I know her as a Pop artist who made furniture that looks like women’s bodies and is made from synthetic material, usually stuffed vinyl. Drawers open and close, suggesting women can be filled with whatever suits our purpose. It’s early body art.

Made in LA displays furry immersive bodysuits into which a visitor can insert his or her arms or legs. The suits are disguises of what we are. In them, we hide or deceive or just have fun. Or they dictate who we are. Skins can have different colors or look attractive or repulsive, and these govern our social interactions. At the Huntington, the skins aren’t interactive but hang on the wall, limp, with texts like “Flower” or “We Don’t Want War.” As art that can be bought from her dealer and displayed as objects, they propose that our personas, or skins, are interchangeable.

The catalogue is what I’ll kindly call impressionistic. I read the text and looked at its hundreds of illustrations. I like the paper, a cut above newsprint — it signals that the show and art are of the moment. It feels and looks like a new, milestone issue of Vanity Fair. That’s good.

Most of the illustrations have nothing to do with the art in the show, or at least they were unrecognizable. They’re meant to suggest the messiness of art-making and, possibly, artist studios. Time flies, as we all know, and we see things in snippets. There are lots of snippet shots in the book, but the book offers the chance to slow down and give people like me time to review what I’ve seen and liked and think about it. An interview with Hedi el Kholti, whose work is very good, was all insider baseball.

Horror movies aren’t a theme in Made in LA but, rather, an inspiration for the organizers and some of the artists, but the connection is esoteric. I’d never heard of The Candyman, a 1992 horror movie, but Jared Sexton has a long essay on it in the middle of the book. The first sentence goes on for 15 lines and says something about “the interregnum between the Sixties and the End of History.” I’m sure Sexton is a good thinker and has much to say that’s engaging, but the essay seems suited for Art Forum. As far as Made in LA goes, it stops the conversation.

I’m up for almost anything, and the book’s attractive and well done. I’ll note, since we live in an era where basics seem to need repeating, that the book is the record of the show. It’s an essential tool for promoting the young artists whose work was selected. It seems dull, but there has to be some uniformity of treatment of the artists — an interview, for instance — and illustrations of the work on view. A section on Mathias Poledna, a good video artist, has two photographs of W. C. Fields and an illustration of a Manet painting. Why?

Poledna’s videos, while we’re here, are intriguing. They’re reenactments of life in old Vienna, so they’re melancholic, even brooding, beautiful and menacing, and a dream for Freud to dine on. They’re annoyingly cryptic, too. In dutifully looking at his work, I started thinking about a type of art-history term paper. I’ve graded thousands of term papers. There’s a type where the student knows what he wants to say but, alas, no reader will. We’re not psychics. Aside from Poledna’s sensitive eye for beauty and wistfulness, there’s only so much aesthetic floatiness we’ll watch before thinking, “What’s your point?”

The Hammer is a museum I always recommend to friends traveling to L.A. It’s the UCLA art museum, though it has always had a separate, distinct, and deeply influential identity. Its foundation is the art collection of Armand Hammer (1898–1990), who ran Occidental Petroleum. As ruthless, manipulative opportunists go, he’s top-tier. I found his tomb, steps away from the museum in a little Westwood cemetery that’s also the forever home of Marilyn Monroe and Billy Wilder. I can only speculate on God’s judgments, but if Hammer is anywhere, it’s a place where fire and brimstone aren’t in short supply.

Why dwell on the past? Hammer’s art collection is very, very good. It includes John Singer Sargent’s Dr. Pozzi, depicting the Paris doctor specializing in women’s health. He’s a tall, lithe, bearded Tyrone Power type, dressed in a red morning robe, his fingers posed against his chest. Let’s face it. He’s every woman’s dream gynecologist. A patient later stabbed him to death. Hammer owned Rembrandt’s late Juno, three Van Goghs, 6,000 works by Honoré Daumier, and Thomas Eakins’s Portrait of Cardinal Martinelli, where Victorian style meets a Borgia-type character.

Last week, I wrote about LACMA’s long record of botched donor relationships. Count Hammer among the alienated. He’d been a trustee of LACMA for years but reneged on his promise to give his art to the museum. In the Olympic event called “Who’d Screw All and Sundry,” Hammer gets the gold, though LACMA probably failed to pry art from Hammer bit by bit rather than wait for a big gift. Hammer gave it to a museum named after him, run by UCLA, on condition that he get a Wilshire Boulevard address for his museum, conveniently the first and second floors of Occidental’s headquarters.

All water over the dam, except for one little thing. I love the Hammer and like Made in LA. I think people should see it. The one little thing, well, actually, the sin not even Martinelli would or could expunge, is putting the entire permanent collection in storage to accommodate Made in LA. Juno, Dr. Pozzi, Martinelli, a Titian portrait, Rembrandt’s Man Holding a Hat, even Toulouse-Lautrec’s portrait of his dog, Touc, are languishing in a vault. A museum never, ever, hides all its treasures to accommodate a temporary show.  I would have edited the show and freed a gallery. Touc wants to go outside!

The museum was called the Armand Hammer Museum for years until the name change, appropriately to the Hammer, to reflect its hard-hitting commitment to living artists. No museum has done more to advance contemporary art in L.A. than the Hammer. Its spaces are great, and the location is perfect. The Hammer conceived the L.A. biennial, but it has also launched retrospectives of the work of Lari Pittman, Adrian Piper, Allan Kupperberg, Jimmie Durham, and Llyn Foulkes. Most are from Southern California. Its Hammer Projects — small, focused shows — gives the best local artists what’s often their first big show. Everything I’ve seen there has been first-rate.

Ann Philbin has been the director since 1999. She’s both the visionary who transformed the museum into an international player and a nuts-and-bolts planner, programmer, and money gatherer. She came from the Drawing Center in New York, which used to be one of my favorite museums until it stiffed me on a Rackstraw Downes drawing show, but let’s forgive and forget, or, more precisely, let’s not, ever.

Philbin came to Los Angeles with good taste, energy, curiosity, and a sense that the nascent contemporary art scene, a brand of Regionalism, could and should launch. Her mentorship has been key for lots of artists, as has her spirit of risk-taking, which all the best directors need. MOCA is chronically, indeed, mortally dysfunctional and the Broad is still a vanity project. The Hammer has done the real work, with good results. Along with L.A.’s art dealers, it has stewarded local artists to the point where Los Angeles is part of the magic that makes the American aesthetic. Philbin proves that leadership makes a difference.