LA><ART

LAXART is pleased to present a screening of CULTURAL CAPITAL COOPERATIVE OBJECT #2, a new video work initiated by London based artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen. CULTURAL CAPITAL COOPERATIVE OBJECT is the title for a series of works where Meineche Hansen organizes a group to collectively produce a cooperatively owned art object. For the second work in this series at LAXART, Meineche Hansen formed a cooperative with five artists—Nikita Gale, Candice Lin, Nour Mobarak, Blaine O'Neill, and Patrick Staff—to produce a remake of Shigeru Izumiya's horror film Death Powder (1986). In addition to engaging the body horror aesthetics and Japanese post–cyberpunk frameworks of the film, this project examines notions of collectivity, co–operative economics, and group relational dynamics, while also revisiting fundamental questions about the role of the artist and the production, reception, circulation, and consumption of art.

CULTURAL CAPITAL COOPERATIVE OBJECT #2 was entirely conceived, produced and filmed by the cooperative onsite at LAXART over the course of one day using their camera phones. For Meineche Hansen, the process of collectively producing the artwork within the site of its reception is central to the project's outcome, foregrounding questions about the artwork as a situationally–specific contingent object that reflects and embodies spatial and temporal limitations of the presenting institution. This reflexive, situationally–specific methodology of artistic practice is influenced by early 90s discussions around “project work,” a term that emphasized art and exhibition–making that was interdisciplinary, context-specific, and involved labor in excess of material production. Within the process of realizing CULTURAL CAPITAL COOPERATIVE OBJECT #2, the artists comprising the cooperative revised LAXART's standard artist agreement to identify the particular authorial role of the cooperative, and to ensure that the economic conditions of production, consumption, and circulation of the work reflect the cooperative model. In addition to the film's screening, this updated contract will be on display and distributed in the main gallery at LAXART. By enacting and disclosing social, material, and legal processes of the project, the cooperative aims to challenge assumptions that internal aspects of exhibition–making are merely a hidden–from–view bureaucratic maneuvering—arguing instead that these efforts by artists permeate and charge our experience with the work, situating its public reception and terms of viewership within the exhibition context and global financial capitalism broadly.

CULTURAL CAPITAL COOPERATIVE OBJECT #1 was included in Sidsel Meineche Hansen's exhibition SECOND SEX WAR at Gasworks, London and the Trondheim Kunstmuseum in Trondheim, Norway (both exhibitions 2016). Together with London based artists Manuela Gernedel, Alan Michael, Georgie Nettell, Oliver Rees, Matthew Richardson, Gili Tal and Lena Tutunjian the cooperative responded to the architecture and economics of the Gasworks exhibition and residency space, which had recently undergone redevelopment.

This project was realized with support from the MA Program in Aesthetics and Politics at the California Institute of the Arts. With special thanks to Arne De Boever, Director of the MA Program in Aesthetics and Politics and to Chris Peters, Director of the Video Lab in the School of Art. Sidsel Meineche Hansen is a visiting artist at the California Institute of the Arts with support from the Danish Arts Foundation.

Performances by: keyon gaskin, laub & Jennifer Moon, Dylan Mira, and Bashir Daviid Naim 

LAXART presents an evening of performances beginning at 6pm on Saturday the 29th. The evening will feature new work including Portland-based artist keyon gaskin's "       a self portrait", and a new presentation by laub & Jennifer Moon. Dylan Mira will perform "Opium" and Bashir Daviid Naim will present a performance made in collaboration with Brazilian artist Paula Pinho Martins Nacif. 

Please join us at 3pm on the 22nd as artists Harry Dodge and Candice Lin  ruminate, percolate, and consider the works and ideas comprised in Protuberances. 

Two nights only: Wednesday, September 14 and Thursday, September 15, 2016

Offsite location:

TAIX

1911 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026

8pm seating for dinner and show

All tickets include dinner, drink, and performance

Tickets are SOLD OUT. 

Please contact Kendall Krummenacher at Kendall@laxart.org in case some tickets do become available.

Riff Raff Tickets: include four-course dinner, glass of wine, and the show
 

Establishment Tickets: In addition to a four-course dinner, wine, choice seating, Establishment patrons also receive a copy of SUR, the new monograph on Lutker’s work published by LAXART (valued at $25). $45 of the Establishment ticket price is tax-deductible and goes directly to support this program. (Please mention what day you'd like to attend in the 'special instructions to recipient' field)

The Sleeping Poet and the Jongleuse is a new cabaret-style performance by artist Shana Lutker. With an eclectic cast including knife jugglers and strongmen, live music, and swinging chandeliers, the show tells the story of a fistfight that took place on July 2, 1925 at a Paris banquet. This performance is part of Lutker’s ongoing body of work on the history of the fistfights of the Surrealists. At the French restaurant TAIX, an LA-fixture since 1927, the audience will enjoy a four-course meal, playfully mirroring the banquet for Symbolist poet Saint-Pol-Roux that was the setting of the contentious 1925 brawl spurred on by the young Surrealists. 

The Sleeping Poet and the Jongleuse is a commissioned performance that is part of LAXART’s Occasional platform and is Lutker’s first performance in Los Angeles. Other performances include The Average Mysterious and the Shirt Off Its Back, part of Chapter 3, commissioned by Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and performed at PAMM in May 2015 and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, as part of Lutker’s solo exhibition Le “NEW” Monocle, Chapters 1 – 3 (October 29, 2015 – February 16, 2016). The Nose, the Cane, the Broken Left Arm, Lutker’s first performance based on the Surrrealist fistfights, was a Performa 13 Commission, staged in NY in 2013. A version of this play was recently presented at Cabaret Voltaire as part of the celebration of the 100^th Anniversary of DADA. 

About The Occasional  

Initiated in 2013, The Occasional is a series of ambitious commissioned projects produced by a national curatorial team that establishes criticality and innovation through collaboration between artists and curators. The Occasional focuses on international artist residencies, long-term projects, and newly commissioned work presented in experimental contexts throughout Los Angeles. The Occasional is a flexible platform that addresses the problematics of biennials; projects are not bound to institutional time but rather allow an artist to work at their own pace through research, development, and execution. The series takes a city in flux as its starting point, examining L.A.’s capacity for experimentation outside traditional institutional settings. 

LAXART’s programs are produced with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The Getty Foundation; The National Endowment for the Arts; The Pasadena Art Alliance; and The Stratton-Petit Foundation 

Please join us for a dialogue between Antonio Adriano Puleo and critic David Pagel in conjunction with Puleo’s exhibition, Massimo Minimalism, currently on view at LA><ART. This public program will also serve as the debut launch for Puleo’s accompanying exhibition publication, which features an essay by Pagel. 

Performing for you, Joshua Aster, and friend Chris Avitabile, will serenade Josh's paintings with songs he wrote using their titles (as lyrics and set list) concurrently with life drawing with Kristin Calabrese and model Scarlette VaVoom – come draw, bring materials – or just check out the show.

An event enlivening and contextualizing our newly launched installation, The Artists’ Library. Designed by Warren Neidich, The Artists’ Library presents books selected by twelve artists, curators, and writers, offering an interactive window into their practices and thinking. For this event, artist Dan Levenson will read new writing while screening a related 3D film, Dave Muller will present books that couldn’t fit on his shelf, and writer Litia Perta will read and discuss a new text written by Chris Kraus that muses on her beloved bookshelf in Mexico. After the presentations, guests are invited to stay and listen to music selected by Dave Muller. 

This event marks the occasion of a six-week long, salon-style, mini-exhibition in the LA><ART Library featuring art work by the twelve participants of The Artists’ Library:  Sarah Beadle, Walead Beshty, Carolina Caycedo, Valentina Desideri, Victoria Fu, Charles Gaines, Pablo Helguera, Chris Kraus, Dan Levenson, Candice Lin, Shana Lutker, and Dave Muller. Future events around The Artists’ Library will take place in January and June, 2017. Please check laxart.org for more info. 

At 3pm, Calabrese and Aster will host a short walk-through of exhibitions at LA><ART before heading into the surrounding neighborhood to serve as public tour guides on an open-ended adventure in observation. Finding patterns and oddities within the urban landscape, the group will seek out clues about the area, it’s activities, inhabitants, transient spaces, and secret beauty. 

Hamza Walker in conversation with Karl Haendel and Tony Lewis.

May 19, 2016 at 7:00 pm.

at LAXART

7000 Santa Monica Blvd.

Please RSVP: RSVP@laxart.org

LAXART is pleased to present a public program revisiting The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism, the influential exhibition curated by the artist Charles Gaines—this program at LAXART features a reading by poet and scholar Fred Moten followed by a dialogue between Gaines and Moten. Theater of Refusal debuted at the University of California Irvine Fine Arts Gallery in April of 1993, and traveled to the UC Davis and UC Riverside art galleries, concluding in February of 1994. The exhibition included work by artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Renée Green, David Hammons, Ben Patterson, Adrian Piper, Sandra Rowe, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Pat Ward Williams, and Fred Wilson. In addition to the artists’ work presented in the gallery, Gaines assembled didactic wall displays and a reading room that featured published art criticism on each of the eleven exhibiting artists. By tracing the critical reception of each artist within the exhibition, Gaines encouraged reflection on the process of reception itself, while also emphasizing the exhibition context as an active site for the formation and interpretation of meaning and subjectivity. The exhibition’s full title suggests that the analytic work of considering (and reconsidering) an artist’s reception must also recognize how criticism is performed and embodied, as well as specifically recognize to what extent criticism has elided, foreclosed, or refused to engage in such a process of consideration and self-inquiry when reflecting on work by black artists. 

1993 was of course a critical marker year for efforts, within the US and globally, to reflect on the field of cultural production as constituted by its social relations, economic conditions, and ideological systems. Gaines’ tracking of the critical reception surrounding the eleven artists exhibited in Theater of Refusal was not an effort to recognize an outright elision by critics of African-American artists and their work, but rather an effort to discuss the severe deficits of art criticism and other legitimizing art institutions in contending with a burgeoning, albeit limited, exposure for marginalized artists in the early 1990s. In its early planning stages, and as it traveled through California university art galleries, Theater of Refusal’s curatorial premise predicted the uncritical habits and deeply unresolved historical problems that drove discourses on identity politics and critical reception surrounding other early 90s case study exhibitions, including Culture in Action and the 1993 Whitney Biennial. 

Theater of Refusal, and the exhibition catalogue for which Gaines contributed an essay, continues to be an influential yet underhistoricized and undertheorized project for many artists and curators working today. In an effort to illuminate this exhibition history and recognize its complex curatorial framework, LAXART has commissioned a new text by Fred Moten reflecting on Theater of Refusal. For the program at LAXART, Moten’s reading of his text will be followed by a dialogue with Gaines, further reflecting on this significant exhibition and its relation to Gaines’ practice. Moten’s essay will also be featured in a forthcoming publication revisiting the exhibition history of Theater of Refusal to accompany this program at LAXART. 

This program wishes to acknowledge Catherine Lord, who as Director of the Fine Arts Gallery at the University of California Irvine from 1991–96 worked closely on Theater of Refusal, and who with Charles Gaines, co-authored the exhibition catalogue. Special thanks to Rhea Anastas for providing crucial guidance and editorial assistance. 

Charles Gaines is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. Over the course of his 40 year career, Gaines’ photographic works, drawings, performances, and works on paper have consistently mobilized critical theory and different critical methodologies to investigate subjectivity, ideology, and visual representation. His most recent survey exhibition, Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974 – 1989, debuted at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2014 and traveled to the Hammer Museum in 2015. In 2013, he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and presented a solo exhibition, Notes on Social Justice, at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. In 2012, Gaines was the subject of a mid-career survey at the Pomona College Museum of Art and the Pitzer College Art Gallery in Claremont, California. Gaines’ work has been featured in major group exhibitions including Blues for Smoke (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012) and Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 (Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2011). He participated in the 2014 Montreal Biennial and the 2007 and 2015 Venice Biennale, as well as group exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Lentos Museum; Deichtorhallen; Kunsthalle Basel; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; and REDCAT Gallery. Gaines’ published essays include Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism (University of California, Irvine, 1993) and The New Cosmopolitanism (California State University, Fullerton, 2008). He is represented by Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Gaines has been full-time faculty in the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts since 1989. 

Fred Moten is a poet and scholar whose work explores Black Studies, Performance Studies, and critical theory. He is the author of Arkansas (2000), In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003), Hughson's Tavern (2008), B Jenkins (2010), The Feel Trio, The Little Edges (both 2014), and, with Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013). The Feel Trio was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in Poetry. He is a Professor at the University of California, Riverside. 

LAXART's programs are produced with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The J. Paul Getty Foundation; The National Endowment for the Arts; The Pasadena Art Alliance; and The Stratton-Petit Foundation.  

Above image: David Hammons, African American Flag, 1989. Installation Photograph: Catherine Opie. 

Press contact: eric@laxart.org  

Screening begins at LAXART at 11:00AM and runs until 6:00PM; Reading begins at 3:00PM and runs until 6:00PM. 

LA><ART is pleased to present a one-day reading and installation revisiting the influential exhibition project, “Services.” Organized by art historian, curator and critic Helmut Draxler and the artist Andrea Fraser, the exhibition "Services: The Conditions and Relations of Service Provision in Contemporary Project Oriented Artistic Practice," opened on January 24, 1994 at the Kunstraum Lüneburg. The opening of the exhibition was preceded by two days of working-group discussions between artists and curators--joined by Draxler and Fraser--that reflected on efforts to reform the social relations and material conditions of exhibition practices. The program at LA><ART will reanimate transcripts Fraser produced from audio recordings of the “Services” working-group sessions; these transcripts will be read aloud by different, invited practitioners working today. In addition to this reading, video documentation of the 1994 working-group discussions at the Kunstraum Lüneburg will be on view in the main gallery. This program revisits “Services” twenty years later to recognize how an under-historicized exhibition provides a model for inquiry into the contentious relations and conditions of exhibition-making today. The script reading and video at LA><ART on April 3^rd will be followed by a discussion with Andrea Fraser, art historian Rhea Anastas, and artist Simon Leung at the Hammer Museum on April 5^th.  

Readers of the “Services” transcript at LA><ART: Basma Alsharif, Michael Ned Holte, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Ashley Hunt, Jamillah James, Adrià Julià, Nevin Kallepalli, Jeff Khonsary, Kate McNamara, Sohrab Mohebbi, Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, Lanka Tattersall, Frances Stark, A.L. Steiner, Martine Syms, Julian Myers-Szupinska, Lincoln Tobier, Noura Wedell, and Kate Wolf.   

The “Services” working-group discussants at the Kunstraum Lüneburg (1994): Judith Barry, Ute Meta Bauer, Jochen Becker, Ulrich Bischoff, Beatrice von Bismarck, Iwona Blazwick, Susan Cahan, Michael Clegg, Stephan Dillemuth, Helmut Draxler, Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Martin Guttmann, Renate Lorenz, Christian Philipp Müller, Fritz Rahmann, Fred Wilson, and Ulf Wuggenig.

Documentation of "Services: The Conditions and Relations of Service Provision in Contemporary Project Orientated Artistic Practice," organized by Helmut Draxler and Andrea Fraser, 22– 23 January 1994, Kunstraum of Lüneburg University, Lüneburg 1994. Videographer: Olaf Krafft. Courtesy Kunstraum of Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Above photo: Michael Schindel, Hamburg.

This program is co-presented with the Hammer Museum.

Jibade-Khalil Huffman will read a new text that departs from his video installation "What Can I Say About That Suit That Hasn't Already Been Said About Afghanistan?"

This event takes place at LAXART, 7000 Santa Monica Blvd.

Katie Grinnan will present an informal walkthrough with her sculptural installation "I Dreamt I Stole an Elevator in a Shopping Mall."  

Ragen Moss and Lucas Blalock will be in dialogue with "A Rregular Shaped Tool," Moss' exhibition of new sculptural works.

This event takes place at LAXART, 7000 Santa Monica Blvd.

Join Elizabeth Diller, founding partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times for an in-depth discussion about the High Line, the significance of public spaces and the firm's recent architectural projects including LA's newest museum, The Broad.

This program was co-ordinated in conjunction with the release of The High Line, a behind-the-scenes account of the creative inspiration behind the High Line, the transformative public 'park in the sky' that has reshaped global perceptions of urban space - and become one of the most beloved and visited destinations in New York City. Copies of The High Line, published by Phaidon, will be available for purchase. 

Elizabeth Diller is a founding partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, an interdisciplinary design studio that integrates architecture, the visual arts and the performing arts. The firm established its identity through theoretical and self-generated projects before coming to international prominence through projects such as Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the High Line. For their commitment to merging art, architecture and culture, founding partners Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio were the first in architecture to be recognized with the MacArthur Foundation "genius" award. 

Christopher Hawthorne has been the architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times since 2004. Before coming to the Times he was architecture critic for Slate and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. He is the author, with Alanna Stang, of The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture.

LA><ART><DESIGN is a new group in keeping with the original mission of LA><ART, as an independent, non-profit space responding to contexts for the exhibition of contemporary art, architecture and design. 

“His basic question was: ‘Can we ever find within determinism a way out of it?’”

-Jean-Paul Sartre, Mallarmé or The Poet of Nothingness, 1988

“The product of this Behavioral approach is that the other is placed in the position of an object.”

  -Paul Verhaeghe, On Being Normal and Other Disorders, 2004   

LA><ART is pleased to present the debut screening of Behavior, a new film work by Los Angeles based artist William Leavitt. In his sculptures, paintings, drawings, films, plays and performance tableaus Leavitt has consistently presented uncanny scenes of domestic life, the built environment, and social interaction—familiar yet estranging representations of Americana that evidence their own artifice and disassociated temporality. Consequently, Leavitt’s work offers an encounter, suspended in time, with a cultural landscape that demands to be incessantly updated. The artist’s fifth film work, Behavior responds to the cultural emphasis on constantly refreshing attention through anachronisms and by way of an extended focus on expectant moments rather than their outcome.  

Leavitt’s Behavior closely follows a loosely intertwined narrative between clustered relationships. The beginning of the film centers around a male and female roommate, two youthful characters named Seth and Deanna without clear romantic affiliation. The storyline then quickly branches out to include the roommates’ circles of friends and neighbors. The narrative setup, as well as the call and response dialogue, immediately invokes American sitcoms and reality television. Identifying how Behavior reproduces or subverts the conventions of popular television is increasingly complicated however by Leavitt’s sculpture as mise-en-scene, and the film’s pivots between deadpan and melodrama. By situating each scene within his sculpture-cum-stage sets, Leavitt amplifies and reverberates the theatrical, disorienting familiar representations of time and place. The fluidity between satire and earnest reflection in Behavior further necessitates a close viewing and listening of the film, underscored by the oracular delivery of dialogue. Rather than prescribe determined techniques for subverting the conventions of sitcoms and reality television, Leavitt recognizes that Brechtian distancing and alienation effects have become an expected device within popular television. Eschewing this determined approach to critique, Behavior instead draws from the history, theory and practice of Theatricality to emphasize the illusory qualities of all representation, as well as to recognize popular media’s expanding capacity for mimesis.             

Beyond its reflection of popular media through multiplied artifice, Behavior presents a satire of authoritative positions of knowing. A subplot repeatedly referenced throughout the film names a distinct group of individuals identified as having “grey tendencies.” At one point, the character Deanna describes these individuals as: “people who suddenly become aware of something that’s been going on for a long time—like Christmas as capitalism—they notice something that to everyone else is completely obvious.” Deanna seems to observe this group tendency as a negative condition, as if acknowledging reality amounts to bad behavior. Foreclosing a discussion of what is assumed to be self-evident, Deanna’s cynicism is contrasted by her roommate Seth’s repeated warnings that she “not be so sure about everything.” Freud’s famed bad news that “man is not master in his own house” was also a position against resigned conclusions. It pointed away from a behavioral approach and towards greater human freedom—subjectivity would have to be expanded, against the strangulations of determinisms that had gone yet undetected. Leavitt’s film calls into question culturally dominant assumptions about individuals that are based simply on observing their behavior—a potential critique of behaviorism. The subplot phrase, “grey tendencies,” suggests a behavior of the mind, a term of pseudo-psychology. And it is amidst the indeterminacy of Leavitt’s compounded artifice that his film suggests the need for alternatives to abolishing ambivalence. Behavior asks: how do we relinquish the obsession with fixed identity and claims of mastery.  

About the Artist

Since the late 1960s, Los Angeles-based artist William Leavitt's work has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions including an extensive survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2011. His work has been included in thematic exhibitions around the world and is in public collections such as Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.