The Fairest of the Seasons in Los Angeles

By Caryn Coleman

Driving across town Thursday evening to Santa Monica for the ART LA fair vernissage during a torrential downpour, I cursed my last two posts here on artreview.com praising both the January rain and LA sprawl as the hazardous trek took me an hour more than usual. It was art fair weekend in LA, with ART LA and the Los Angeles Art Show setting the city's artworld abuzz. More than in previous years, there was an organized city-wide effort to get all of the L.A. art scene involved, with late night openings in Chinatown and Culver City held in conjunction with the fair, as well as multiple after-parties in each art district. Granted, this is no Art Basel Miami Beach, but it's as good as it gets in LA, a town where the art world operates differently than any other.

Now in its fourth year, ART LA, the new Los Angeles international contemporary art fair, is produced by artfairs inc. As in previous years, the 2008 edition had a natural LA-orientation, with local galleries 1301PE, Anna Helwing, Kontainer, Peres Projects, Patrick Painter, Lizabeth Oliveria, and Regen Projects all in attendance. But it also brought in outside heavy-hitters like Bortolami, Anton Kern, Salon 94 and and Taxter and Spengemann from New York, and Haunch of Venison from London/Berlin/Zürich. In its publicity, ART LA has really pushed the presence of these major galleries, and who can blame them? It's an impressive list. So the question is no longer whether the galleries will come to LA (an issue that dogged the fair's first years); it's whether collectors from LA and beyond will come and buy at the fair. In this art fair-saturated moment, are people just tired of traveling to fairs, especially in between Miami (Art Basel plus 22 other fairs) and New York (the Armory Show plus approximately six other fairs)? I ask these questions with love of LA in my heart. I would vastly prefer Art Basel Miami Beach was Art Basel LA instead, but given the sheer number of fairs, the art overload and the dying down of the spending frenzy, where does an LA art fair culture fit? After going to the fairs this week, the answer is: I honestly don't know. Los Angeles has historically been bereft of successful art fairs, but I think the reason for this may lie more within fairs themselves rather than LA.

Existential art fair questions aside, ART LA was impressive. Let's be honest, art fairs are overwhelming and laborious, but I enjoyed myself during both of my two visits. To me, the LA gallery booths stood out most, especially those that did more than the standard fare – Peres Projects had a functioning bar by Terrance Koh (though Koh was not manning it), West of Rome had a mini-lounge complete with a graffiti-scrawl called Magazine Station n2 Transmission Desk 1, Roberts and Tilton had an expansive Andrew Schoultz painting with his vibrant mixture of horses, wood, and color bursts, Regen Projects featured Andrea Zittel's artsy one-of-a-kind dresses in Smockshop, and at Lizabeth Oliveria, Jon-Paul Villegas elaborated on his current installation at the gallery back in Culver City.

Andrea Zittel at Regen Projects


Andrew Schoultz painting at Roberts and Tilton


Marnie Weber piece at Patrick Painter Gallery

Other LA galleries housed fantastic pieces such as Mindy Shapiro's new jewel-like works on paper at Anna Helwing, Marnie Weber's divinely bizarre works at Patrick Painter, Pae White's paper cut-out chandelier at 1301PE, and Gert and Uwe Tobias's gothicly gorgeous painting at Happy Lion. My favorite booth though was Haunch of Venison, which showed a Bill Viola video diptych (on screen panels that made them look like framed moving paintings) and a Zhang Huan black-as-night painting with vague skulls made with burnt incense (yes, I smelled it).


Entrance to the Los Angeles Art Show. All photos: Caryn Coleman

Visiting the Los Angeles Art Show (and the ifpda Fine Art Fair) at the Santa Monica Barkar Hanger on Sunday afternoon was vastly different experience than ART LA. Moving beyond art of the 'moment', this fair incorporated contemporary, modern, print, photography, impressionism and more. It was a lot to go through, most of it not to my taste, but this personal adventure did bring out some gems. There was John Chamberlain's precious crushed can sculpture Sockets (1977) that was still so "now" it could have fitted easily into the Hammer's 2005 survey of young LA sculptors, called Thing. Speaking of still now, a small Ben Shahn work on paper, of three men in uniform leading a civilian to some unknown destination, is a clear precursor to today's darlings Marcel Dzama and Chris Johanson. I also saw a divine Jean Cocteau drawing with poem in it that made me wonder why, at $4000, anyone would buy anything else at any fair.

Overall both fairs seemed well attended despite the LA 'storm watch'. However each catered to differing crowds. ART LA drew the more hipster art crowd mixed with contemporary art mega-collectors such as the Rubells, Dean Valentine, and Blake Bryne. The LA Art Show was more of an older crowd and had a healthy does of the general public. As for sale indications, ART LA being a contemporary art fair one never knows if no red dots means a work sold, if red dots actually mean something sold, or if switching out works is a mere marking tool. Numbers aren't in but I believe dealers did well enough – I have heard both Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Miami) and Kontainer (LA) had near sell out booths. Sales at the LA Art Show were more apparent, with liberal use of red dots. Prints – and Dürer and Rembrandt etchings – seemed to be selling especially well.

But the art talk wasn't only about the fairs this week. Standing in line for food at the ART LA opening (which, by the way, was a benefit for the Hammer Museum's 'Hammer Projects' scheme for emerging artists), a man said to me, "While we're here at the is party Federal Agents are raiding LACMA." And it was true, sort of. The raids didn't happen during the opening but early the next morning Federal Agents showed up at four Los Angeles museums (LACMA, Pacific Asia Museum, the Bowers Museum, the Mingei International Museum), and at the Silk Roads Gallery investigating looted antiquities from Thailand, Myanmar, China and Native American sites. No charges have been filed yet from the raids, which were made by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement office, the National Park Service and the criminal investigation division of the Internal Revenue Service. Museum directors were surely surprised; Michael Govan of LACMA had to wait outside before being allowed into the building.

The fairs this week confirmed my belief that Los Angeles might one day become a major player in the art fair business. But with the art world changing daily, and fairs becoming less of a sure thing, I don't know if any of this even matters. Sure, people here in LA want to promote the quality of the art that exists here, but the timing, in regards to accomplishing this through fairs, may be off. In the meantime, I hope that the producers of ART LA and the LA Art Show continue to improve upon their models and, especially in the case of ART LA, push the boundaries that need to be pushed.


Caryn Coleman runs Sixspace gallery in Culver City, and art.bloggin.la