Notes from the Overpass: New Art from Los Angeles and St. Petersburg
at Galleriet G18, August 21, 2007
“-Since I was a little girl, I dreamed of the West.
-In Sweden?
-Yes! Oh yes. I used to have visions about it.
-Visions.
-Vistas would appear.
-Where did you hear about the West in Sweden?
-Movies. American movies. We see that great landscape in our dreams. It haunts us.”
-excerpt from “Gary Cooper, or the landscape”, by Sam Shepard, 1996
In the summer of 2007, several very large and very broad art exhibitions dominated the European art landscape including the Venice Biennale, Documenta, Art Basel and Skulptur Projekte Munster. While these shows all occur at regular intervals, to have them all in one summer laid the ground for a general critical referendum on shows of this type – large, culturally and ideologically diverse exhibitions whose guiding principals tend to have their roots in earlier eras, when a more narrow definition of art existed. The critical reaction to the majority of them was almost uniformly grim, suggesting the future of such shows may be limited. While this may seem like a generally poor thing for art as a whole, the summer was full of strong shows throughout the art world, shows that set much more realistic agendas and largely succeeded. While many were less accessible, or perhaps less marketed, a savvy viewer could discern much more about the currents and trends of the European art world by carefully choosing among these, and they might walk away not as fatalistic as the reviewers leaving Germany or Italy.
In Notes from the Overpass: New Art from Los Angeles and St. Petersburg, a small cadre of young artists were drawn together by a different principle. The plan for the show was optimistic and experimental; to bring together artists from two wildly different cities, loosely grouped around a comparison concept, use a relatively new gallery, and try to regain, in the face of so many lumbering, dying exhibition strategies, a new sense of beginning. In contrast to the Documentas of the world, the idea seemed refreshing.
While the artists in the show were equally split amongst St Petersburg and Los Angeles, so much has already been said regarding the collective utopian fantasy that California has represented for more than a generation, as well as the media machine that creates it. More still has been written about the fallout from that fantasy that the smog hanging over the city represents; a sick-yellow Post-it note, a constant reminder of the cost of living out our dreams. The terms on which one exists in Los Angeles are a well-documented Faustian bargain with nature and the vehicles of success. The media image of and by LA has kept much of the world in thrall to it for nearly a century, and yet, today there is a question of its continuing dominance. Perhaps this is the fulcrum on which the show balanced; the continued relevance of the Wild West myth to the world.
As well, in her explanation of the show, curator Emily Newman talks about St. Petersburg and Los Angeles representing cities that are often thought of as “second” in their respective countries. Los Angeles seems to always come behind New York in whatever scale by which we measure these things. The scorn the two cities reserve for each other is the stuff of legend. Similarly with Petersburg and Moscow.
Much like the 19th century English impressionists found painterly inspiration in the smokestacks and coal fires of the Black Country, the LA artists seemed to uncover visual motifs in the problematic visual landscape of their home city, and by the formative history that still lingers there. Jen Schwarting and Gian-Martin Joller both delivered work that directly engaged pollution as an aesthetic inspiration. Schwarting’s work hung on the wall like a giant cloth pinwheel playground ride, alternating dark grey to light grey. The dourness of the color scheme rejected frivolity and a viewer returned to the play of the flat shape to the landscape within the cloth itself, suggesting the landscape of Los Angeles as seen from above – a sea of monochrome clouds, with the small peaks of hills poking through to the sky.
Joller responded similarly, with an acknowledgement of the meaning of driving in the social and aesthetic lives of LA’s inhabitants. A small fan inflated a cloud-shaped silver fabric balloon over the gallery space. The reflective surface of the fabric suggested the chrome that plays a central role in the car culture of LA, while the cloud itself represented the more problematic output of said culture. Joller posits that Los Angeles seems to be a land where the pursuit of aesthetics is inextricably caught up in its own undoing.
Hadley Holiday and Bari Ziperstein both engage the fantasy California still holds in the mind of the country. Holiday’s paintings reference both early modernist experimentation in her geometric, overlapping shapes, and hippy culture in her psychedelic color scheme and the eye-candy of her layered thin washes of paint. Ziperstein’s work perhaps has the most direct relationship to Scandinavia and its history of modernist design. Appropriating photographs from housing and interior decorating magazines of the 60’s and 70’s, she alters them, imagining large white, minimalist rays shooting through the décor, reordering the spaces in terms not their own, upending photographic perspective and space.
The quote at the beginning of this essay suggests an America that still holds the world’s attention with its myth of wide open spaces within which to reinvent yourself. Can the mass export of that myth still carry weight in a Europe increasingly shaped by the anti-Americanism that’s defined our era? Specifically, do Scandinavians (or Russians) still dream of California during the dark winter months? Or is it now Spain? In a Europe that is seemingly overtaking America, both economically and image-wise, the US borders on irrelevancy. Perhaps, as the work in this show suggests, the fantasy has indeed passed. The dominating motifs in the LA portion of the show, nostalgia and disillusionment, imply a city (and perhaps nation) bankrupt on promises, and yet, the work seems to be arguing for the continued availability of beauty in such a situation.
For St. Petersburg, a much more complicated relationship exists between Helsinki—where Part I of the show was held-- and America, with whom they share the gallery space. Finland and Russia share a long east-west border, and an equally long back-and-forth relationship. Currently, with Finland representing one of the great success stories of the EU, and Russia seemingly slipping back to the uncertain political status from whence it came, the nervous tension between the two countries cannot be overstated. Yet the work on display from Petersburg showed humanity, wit, and global contemporaneity.
Historically, few cities have gone through as much as St. Petersburg, and one expects artwork from there to contain some of the pathos and soul that living in such a place engenders. The Russian portion of Notes didn’t fail in this respect. Most noteworthy was a piece by Vladimir Lilo describing an older woman’s experience calling in to a local radio show with a song request. A valise hung on the wall plays the song itself, with a photograph backlit though the case’s cover of the woman in her tiny Petersburg apartment, listening to the radio. A viewer peeks in on the small moment of humor and lightness that’s informed by the weight in the lived history of the woman’s life.
A strong video program featured a mix of Americans and Russians, including curator Emily Newman’s interesting work that played on received notions of language. She films her one-year old son slowly working his way around learning to speak. However, as an American baby living in Russia, with a Russian nanny, what language is he speaking exactly? The adults in the film square off over the issue, and then, at Newman’s insistence, find themselves being filmed listening to headphones, attempting to imitate her son’s recorded noises. Slowly, they veer from actual words to nonsense, and the din of a house filled with children begins to reverberate through the gallery as adults and children alike are reduced to babble.
Indeed, babble became the theme of the show, as Finnish-speaking Finns in a Swedish-speaking gallery mingled with Americans and Russians. Newman’s curatorial theme coalesced this disparate group and gave structure to the work. The show reminded a viewer that artists from outside their nation’s cultural capitals often feel freer to make art that doesn’t adhere to more market-oriented scenes. Cheaper living expenses, isolation from fleeting trends and a stronger sense of community can create a specific identity amongst artists. As was evident in the work, there is also a wealth of inspiration to be found in the visual landscape of the cities themselves. From Los Angeles’ strange and ominous environment to St Petersburg’s history and pathos, the artist’s do justice to the idea that art is made where artists live, and not the other way around.
If we look again at the larger group shows that defined this past summer, perhaps Notes was not as well advertised, maybe it lacked as many marquee names in the lineup. Should finding good art be as easy as walking into the nearest convention center or kunsthalle? Notes argues for its own importance, and for the importance of these secondary centers of cultural production, through a tightly structured curatorial strategy and work that defended itself. If Newman makes us work a bit harder for the pleasure of finding such a show beneath the din and roar of the summer’s shows, perhaps we can only blame ourselves for failing to look.
