Monday, May 11, 1998
Creation station
ART: The Santa Monica Museum of Art finds a new venue for the
avant garde in Bergamot Station
By Michael Gillette
Daily Bruin Contributor
The Santa Monica Museum of Art celebrated its reopening at its
new Bergamot Station site with a gala benefit event Thursday
evening.
The opening featured two new and noteworthy exhibits, "Back
Yard," a massive bead sculpture by conceptual artist Liza Lou, and
"Playing With Matches," a retrospective look at the collage work of
Fluxus Art Movement Founder Al Hansen organized by his grandson,
rock performer Beck.
The Bergamot Station site was as much on display Thursday night
as the exhibits themselves. The site resembles a series of
warehouses set apart from one another. The effect of this plan is
not at all as alienating as it sounds. Instead it conveys, by its
nature, the looseness implied in the museum’s stated purpose of
being a "non-collecting, artist-driven organization."
To that end, the site features an auction house and studio space
for the museum’s unique Artist Project Series. This series, which
the museum trustees began in 1988 gives artists the opportunity to
create ambitious works with the trustees’ cooperation. It was
within this series that Lou developed her "Back Yard" work.
"Back Yard" shows together in this exhibition with Lou’s other
large scale sculpture, "Kitchen," and together the two make quite
an impression. Composed entirely of tiny, sparkling beads, these
two life-size works recreate and reimagine the mundanity of their
subjects.
There are precedents for these giant works. Lou herself has
mentioned Judy Chicago’s epic sculpture "Dinner Party" as an
influence for the way it enshrined the traditionally feminine,
domestic realm and the recreations of recognizable consumer
products, such as Lays potato chip bags and Budweiser bottles which
immediately call to mind Andy Warhol.
These works make their own distinct imaginative statement,
dazzling the eye with their wealth of detail. As the eye settles,
however, shortcomings in the works appear. For instance, the
strange chair in "Kitchen" suggests a Van Gogh-like warping of
perspective that no other detail in the piece seconds. Likewise,
the beer rushing from the tipped bottle in "Back Yard" indicates a
freezing of time in the piece that is nowhere else evident.
The lack of unity in detail underscores a lack of cohesion in
the pieces at large that leads the viewer to feel estranged from,
or unengaged with these otherwise instantly identifiable works.
A viewer will have an even tougher time engaging with the work
of performance artist Al Hansen. As a member of the Fluxus
movement, Hansen and his peers held "Happenings," where audiences
would gather and "art" would be staged rather than made.
These events, by their nature, required no formal artistic
talent and neither, apparently, did the pieces the museum has
selected for his exhibition. The exhibition on display is made up
largely of two series of works from Hansen’s career. The first is a
series of collages made from Hershey’s candy bar wrappers, and the
second, a collection of mounted sculptures of women’s torsos made
from cigarette butts.
These pieces all convey a sense of poorly thought through
dabbling. Each series calls to mind several more fully conceived
antecedents and, in doing so, highlights its own comparative
shortcomings. But more than that, all of the work, series and
individual pieces included, are striking for their lack of
aesthetic accomplishment.
Nothing in the color, design or material impresses the eye. Of
more interest are the photos documenting Hansen’s involvement in
the Fluxus group’s "Happenings," many of which feature pop culture
figures such as John Lennon and, of course, Beck.
ART: Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan
Ave., (310) 586-6488. Suggested Donation: general $4, students and
artists $2.
Photos courtesy of Santa Monica Museum of Art
LIza Lou’s "Back Yard" is one of two beaded sculptures on
display at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.
"Back Yard" is Liza Lou’s sequel to "Kitchen."
A sandwich on a picnic table is a beaded detail in "Back Yard"
by Liza Lou.