ART IN LA: Where, exactly, is Los Angeles? Somewhere between the studio lot and the Eagle Rock studio, Chinatown and Chinatown? Between the “playfield of the devil,” as Richard Neutra called it, and the “hyperurban configuration” described by Fredric Jameson? On the occasion of “Pacific Standard Time,” the J. Paul Getty Museum’s mammoth initiative opening this month, Artforum gets lost in the shifting scenes of postwar and contemporary LA and the art that has unfolded within them:
· Anne M. Wagner maps out the social geography of Chris Burden’s performances, charting their intense engagement with the Los Angeles landscape:
“To take the measure of Burden’s work is to locate the pattern that gave shape to (and took shape from) a city understood as limit, container, and tool.”
· Michelle Kuo and Richard Meyer moderate a roundtable with artists John Baldessari, Harry Gamboa Jr. , and Liz Larner, art historians Thomas Crow and Andrew Perchuk, curators Maurice Tuchman and Ali Subotnik, and gallerist Helene Winer to assess the radical movements, material environments, and cultural communities that distinguish LA’s artistic legacy.
· In two special projects for Artforum, Chris Burden illustrates feats of engineering that fascinate him, and Raymond Pettibon offers a portfolio of Californiana.
· Seventeen artists—Eleanor Antin, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Morgan Fisher, Simone Forti, Liz Glynn, Piero Golia, Martin Kersels, Robert Kinmont, Fred Lonidier, Paul McCarthy, Charles Ray, Ed Ruscha, Jim Shaw, Kerry Tribe, Kaari Upson, and James Welling—give their takes on the ins and outs of art in LA.
· And: John Miller reconciles the forward-thinking yet homegrown feminism of the videos and photographs of Ilene Segalove; Linda Norden is transported by the work of John McCracken; Matthew Biro dissects Robert Heinecken’s art of extremes; David E. James screens avant-garde film in the shadow of the Hollywood sign; Michael Ned Holte decodes Charles Gaines’s systems of suspense and subjectivity; and four authors—Julia Bryan-Wilson writing on Asco, James Merle Thomas on Maria Nordman, Elizabeth Schambelan on John Divola, and Bennett Simpson on Rodney McMillian—take “Close-Ups” of individual artworks.
· Plus: The last interviews with the late Leo Steinberg; Nick Mauss admires Madame Grès garments at the Musée Bourdelle; Amy Taubin finds redemption in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia; Briony Fer studies Lygia Pape’s involutions at the Reina Sofía; Joan Kee immerses herself in the Lee Ufan retrospective at the Guggenheim; and Patti Smith gives a Hall of Fame–worthy Top Ten.
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