Wild Wild West: Young Art at the 2004 California
Biennial
Young artists are
undermining Hollywood's myths, the American middle class, and the
commercialization of private life: the Orange County Museum of Art in
Newport Beach is currently presenting the "2004 California Biennial" with
the support of Deutsche Bank - and shows how exciting and multi-faceted
the American West Coast scene really is.
Mark Bradford: Untitled (Shoe), 2003
Courtesy Brent Sikkema, New York
With 28
artists and over 120 works, the newly renovated
Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in Newport Beach is showing a
comprehensive view of current West Coast art, to this day unique in
California: installations, sculptures, painting, works on paper, video,
and photography. The museum has been putting on the biennial since 1984,
which has gone on to become internationally renowned.
For two
years, curators Elizabeth Armstrong and Irene Hofmann paid countless
visits to studios, galleries, and institutions in order to give this
year's exhibition its unmistakable profile. Each participant in the 2004
California Biennial was born between 1960 and 1970. All belong to a
generation that was just as influenced by the debates over globalization,
gender roles, and new technologies as it was by movies, music, computer
games, TV, Grunge and skateboard culture. This fits in well with the
curators' concept, which seeks to focus on the subversive energy the young
Californian scene of the multi-cultural melting pot brings to bear in
sending out its impulses to the international art world.
Brian Calvin: Noon, 2002
Ruth and Jacob Bloom Collection, Marina del Rey, California
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"It smells like Teenage Spirit": the pale, androgynous
figures on
Brian Calvin's melancholic paintings could have been inspired by
Nirvana's lead singer Kurt
Cobain. Calvin not only portrays the existence of the
"Twenty-somethings" as being pretty desolate, but also the act of painting
itself.
With an attitude that is occasionally ironic and that never
succumbs to pathos, the art of the California Biennial constitutes a
thematic and conceptual contrast to the current painting boom in Europe.
While the collector Charles
Saatchi solemnly celebrates
The Triumph of Painting in a large exhibition in London and the German
newspapers have diagnosed a young painting generation's return to the
beautiful, fantastic, and uncanny, the artists at OCMA are almost all
oriented towards everyday reality, cool media images, and the
commercialization of urban space. Thus,
Mark Bradford appropriates the aesthetic of modernist abstraction and
combines it in his assemblages with found objects from the area
surrounding southern Los Angeles.
Mungo Thompson: The American Desert (for Chuck Jones), 2002
Video (installation view)
Collection
of Orange County Museum of Art
At the OCMA,
the trend clearly seems to be shifting from canvas to installation and
video: Mungo
Thomson's video work The American Desert (for Chuck Jones),
made in 2002, is a homage to the legendary "Roadrunner" cartoons the
animation artist Chuck Jones made
for Warner Brother studios between 1949 and 1964. Yet Thomson removed all
the comic figures from the film strips, leaving only the stylized view of
a cultural historical legend: the vast empty landscapes of the American
west. For the video loop Who's Afraid of Black, White and Grey
(2003), the Japanese artist
Kota Ezawa turned film excerpts from the marriage drama
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) into black and white cartoons.
In their stark contrasts and clear contours, the digital images are
reminiscent of
Henri Matisse's cutouts or the paintings by the pop artist
Alex Katz. Yet despite this, we're looking at thoroughly American
tragedies here: divorce, alcoholism, all of life's self-deception. In
using found material such as the TV images from the spectacular
O.J. Simpson trial, Enzawa subverts the myth of the American family - a
strategy that connects him to many other artists of the California
Biennial.
The fact that a touch of utopia always enters the game
despite the occasional dose of cynicism can be seen in the
interdisciplinary concepts of groups such as VALDES (Los Angeles) that
focus on aspects of urban growth in Orange County. When the artists' group
implements a digitally reworked panorama of the San Fernando Valley
showing streets extending endlessly through housing settlements lit up at
night, a distorted pioneer spirit becomes palpable. The motif stems from
Steven Spielberg's blockbuster film E.T. and the traveler viewing
this unknown landscape for the first time is an alien.
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