LorraineO'Grady

Gaines’s end-of-year review looks at Los Angeles and examines the blurring boundaries between art and entertainment. Its pointed commentary on The First and the Last of the Modernists’ image strategies was the most perceptive on the piece to date. **** 
frieze asked a range of artists, critics and curators from around
the world to choose what, and who, they felt to be the most
significant shows and artists of 2010 and what they’re looking
forward to in 2011 Malik Gaines 
Curator at LAX ART, Los Angeles, USA and a member of the
performance group My Barbarian. 
It’s encouraging to look at Los Angeles, more than a decade after
magazines were trumpeting its arrival as an ‘important’ art
centre, and see a maturation of the ‘emerging artist’ class. Of
course stalwarts such as Mike Kelley, Lari Pittman and Marnie
Weber continue to shine. But impressive shows this year from
Edgar Arceneaux, Alexandra Grant, Pearl C. Hsiung, Stanya
Kahn, Yunhee Min, and many others suggest that an intelligent,
technical young practice can evolve nicely over the long term,
and that LA’s art culture has produced much more than a
sensational moment; there is an art civilization here that feels
durable. These artists are producing works that are great to look
at, but that resist the encroaching spectacle culture. 
This defence is now a necessity. While the LA art world has
typically functioned in détente with Hollywood, the lines have
blurred. Earlier in the year, University of California performance
scholar Jennifer Doyle wrote good analyses (published on
frieze.com) of Nao Bustamante on the television reality show
Work of Art and James Franco’s and Kalup Linzy’s appearances
on the daytime soap opera General Hospital. la moca’s complicity
with the latter project drew attention to the institution’s Deitchification, which has been a mixed bag. Ryan Trecartin’s recent exhibition at the museum was impressive, mixing a YouTube sensibility with an inheritance of queer cinema and performance, while skillfully presenting the work as an immersive museum installation. There, the mode of entertainment occasionally produced awareness of generic structures and their logic, an effect that entertainment genres themselves only rarely propose.In showing Dennis Hopper with one hand while cancelling Jack Goldstein with the other, moca has also sent some disheartening messages in the last year. Despite contemporary LA’s difference from ’80s New York, one imagines the dissipated ghosts of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring lingering behind some choices, promoting an interest in popular forms that, for example, led to the insertion of a television dance instructor into the institution’s experimental ‘Engagement Party’ series. I’ve heard from a couple of people an idea that the popular approach is more populist; the notion that celebrities, clothes, and fun are for the people, while advanced art is for the elite. Others have argued that this socalled populism is really an elision with corporatism. While there are problems with the old-fashioned museum model, a legitimate fear is that the best parts of what museums do will be subsumed under a celebrity-commodity mandate. It’s clear that ‘celebritocracy’ is a poor form of government. California has produced two movie-star governors in the past decades – Ronald Reagan and the present incumbent, Arnold Schwarzenegger – and they have both been terrible. In politics, the danger is clear. (Need I mention a particular Alaskan politician who recently aired her own reality show?) In art, there can be reasons to entertain, to adapt entertainment forms and content. But let us hesitate before we lay ourselves out for consumption by the entertainment-postindustrial-complex. 
A thoughtful approach to mass image production was offered by
two wonderful works in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, by New York
artists Danny McDonald and Lorraine O’Grady. Both use Michael
Jackson as subject matter. In his kinetic assemblage, The
Crossing: Passengers Must Pay a Toll In Order to Disembark
(Michael Jackson, Charon, & Uncle Sam), (2009), McDonald has a
Thriller-style Jackson doll presenting a giant penny in order to
gain admission to the underworld, as Uncle Sam lays nearby,
penniless and expired. O’Grady, in a series of portraits entitled
‘The First and the Last of the Modernists’ (2010), provides a map
of Modernism’s dead-end, while addressing the ways that popular
images produce categorical notions of race, age and life itself. In
these pieces, the deceased star is used to interrogate the
historical situation he symbolizes, reflecting back onto viewers a
sense of the mechanics of our imposing image world, leaving this
viewer with the insistent impression that there is still meaning to
be had, even from such as this. Should I be offered my own
television show, that’s the point I’ll try to make.