Installation view of Friedrich Kunath's show at Blume & Poe. Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe.

I was slapped by a child named Sam who must have been 4 years old the last time I visited Friederich Kunath’s show Lacan’s Haircut at Blum & Poe. Sam was playing with his sister on the bright yellow carpet in the first gallery — each subsequent gallery has bright carpet too, orange then red. He had been fondling one of the oversize oranges with squinty eyes and pointy nose when we locked eyes. Then, after a pause, he sort of sashayed over and slapped me on the hand. It didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t gentle either.

A woman who wasn’t his mother called him over in that too sweet I-have-something-serious-to-say-but-don’t-know-how-to-talk-to-children voice. So I thought she had seen what just went down, but, probably, she hadn’t because what she said was, “I just want to congratulate you, Sam. I saw you looking at that painting over there and most children wouldn’t be able to do that for that long without touching it. I was impressed by how cultured you are.” I thought, better to touch a painting than randomly hit people, and since when does repressing tactile urges make you “cultured”?

Friedrich Kunath, "You Go Your Way and I'll Go Crazy," 2012, Digital video. Courtesy the artist and Blum and Poe.

The Kunath show, oversaturated in the best way, has sculptures of big enamel and resin loafers as well as the oversized fruit, and old-fashioned rendering of bearded men sleeping under trees or explorers on horseback sharing canvas space with cartoon characters and psychedelically colored polygons. In the back video gallery, You Go Your Way, and I’ll Go Crazy plays. It’s a video in which a tall guy who looks like a slightly glamorized version of South African writer J.M. Coetzee works in his studio, fondling the oranges just like Sam did, talking on a rotary phone that’s not plugged in to anything, wading into a pool fully clothed, standing nude over the San Gabriel Mountains, hitting tennis balls against some of the paintings that are in the exhibition. It’s insane, but in a smooth and subdued way, which is why being slapped by a preschooler while perusing this show felt kind of like par for the course.

I left at the exact same moment Sam, strapped into a car-seat, was pulling away, riding in a station wagon. We locked eyes again — I swear– and he waved.

Lucio Fontana, Concetto spaziale, Attese 58 T 2 (Spatial Concept, Expectation 58 T 2), 1958.

A few days later, at the opening of MOCA’s Destroy the Picture, I was backing away to get a better view of  a painting by Lucio Fontana, when I backed right into a regal older woman with soft hands. I know about her hands, because when I apologized, she grabbed my hand and squeezed, and said, “No, I’m sorry.” I like this, actually, the random physical contact while art-looking trend. It intensifies the whole experience, and an occasional slap might be worth it.

Victor Boullet/The Institute of Social Hypocrisy, 2011. Photo: 2nd Cannons Publications.

On January 5^th, 2^nd Cannons Publications, artist Brian Kennon’s publishing venture, sent out a press release. It announced “the last exhibition in our Chinatown project space/vitrine,” a small closet-sized enclave at 510 Bernard St. with a glass sliding door. 2^nd Cannons has been hosting miniature shows there for the past 3 years. The release continued, “We will not be moving to Culver City (if we were moving we would move to Hollywood),” an obvious jab at the recent exodus of galleries to Culver, the industrial turned industry neighborhood, that, over the past few years, has become home to a growing “main drag” of commercial galleries.

The final 2^nd Cannons exhibition is a haphazard eruption of an installation: a large gray poster that’s been scrawled on, a cagey, psychologically manipulative letter that creates a web of desire around identity (reads one line, “Edvard Munch told me that Dr Jacobsen told you that Francis Bacon once told David Sylvester by being homosexual he was relieved of the heterosexual commitments in life, and by that he meant he could work more”), and a bubbling, spilling beer-can filled fountain. All this has been assembled on behalf of The Institute for Social Hypocrisy, the front for Paris-based artist Victor Boullet’s publications and collaborations. The installation has an angsty, irresponsible rebelliousness to it, and feels like the work of someone who’s been wronged.

Still from Culver City promotional video by Agents in Action! real estate consultants.

It was that feeling, coupled with the line from the press release–we won’t be moving to Culver–that led me to, at first, assume the closing of 2^nd Cannons’ vitrine, and even the nature of its final exhibition, must somehow be in reaction to galleries leaving Chinatown. I had some small basis for this assumption; other spaces, like the white cube  occupied by alternative arts org Human Resources L.A. (which will likely reopen in Chinatown, or nearby) had been indirect victims of larger galleries leaving. But 2^nd Cannons is just closing its vitrine (it’s primarily a press, after all), and its last exhibition is just that: an exhibition of art by an artist who manufactured the eruption and grouped together its unapologetically discordant references.

I have it in my head that Culver City should be resented, and I know I’m not being fair—it’s that liberally educated, young person instinct to hate change when it moves toward something more “established” but to love it when it breaks things apart. It’s also a bit of nostalgia. Some of the first, most exciting art encounters I had in L.A. were in Chinatown—at China Art Objects, Peres Projects, and David Kordansky Gallery in particular. All of these spaces subsequently moved to Culver; Kordansky first, Peres second, and then, just this fall, China Art Objects. And while Chi-town galleries have been heading west—collectors are reportedly reluctant to venture all the way Eastside–Santa Monica spaces have been moving East. Angles Gallery, which used to be right off the ocean, is now on La Cienega, while Mark Moore, which spent fifteen years at Bergamont Station, is now on Washington Boulevard, across the street from Roberts & Tilton, its former Santa Monica neighbor (besides the company they’d be keeping, what pulled Mark Moore to Culver was the opportunity to own and design a space of their own–a perfectly worthy desire).

Drew Heitzler, "La Brea Tar Pits (Mexican Fan Palm)," Mexican fan palm tree and Performix plastidip, installation view, 2008. Redling Fine Art at Art Positions, Art Basel Miami Beach. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

China Art Objects’ newly renovated space is perhaps better suited to their changing needs than their charming former Chung King Road location (now home to Pepin Moore, a gallery with an impressive roster all its own), and, while Francois Ghebaly‘s narrow new garage-like space is a lot stranger than either his Chung King Road or Bernard Street locations, it does feel like it’s right where the action is, tucked into that busy intersection of Venice and La Cienega.

When painter David Hockney moved to Los Angeles in the 60s, all the galleries were on one strip in Hollywood–“They were run by young people and they showed young artists,” he  recalls. “On a Monday evening people parked their cars, and walked up the street and looked in. It was very pleasant.” And it was a way for Hockney to meet artists, and art fans. Where the galleries were is among one of the least compelling of all Hockney’s recollections of early Los Angeles days, however. It’s more interesting to hear about how he visited Physique Pictorial in a “very seedy area of downtown” and met a “complete madman” with a “tacky swimming pool surrounded by Hollywood Greek plastic ceramics,” or about how he found cheap studio space with an ocean view in Venice.

It’s the traversing of space that’s always been most interesting about the way art in L.A. works–the ability to move in an out of the art world or “to work off the grid” (as artist Katie Grinnan discussed two Sundays ago, during a panel at Art Los Angeles Contemporary). And even if one neighborhood, like Culver, becomes more of a “center” than any other, it’s hard to imagine that the city’s penchant for flux would be tamped completely. (Recently,  I spoke with gallerist Tom Solomon, whose space remains in Chinatown for the time being, and he hesitated when I suggested he’d moved often–he’s had, more or less, four L.A. spaces in roughly two neighborhoods, and also ran White Columns in New York. Talk to Michael Kohn, he suggested, or others who have been far more nomadic.) Moving is a deep-seeded part of  life in any creative scene where sensibilities and finances change in an instant, but even more so here.  “You hear about the landscape of galleries, even in the ’80s, that are now closed,” said Grinnan the Sunday before last. “That feeling that L.A. is in constant flux does make you feel like there’s all this territory to do things. It has a sense of invisibility also, where you can find these pockets where nobody is watching. It’s easy to find those pockets.”

David Hockney, "A Bigger Splash," 1967.

Around 1970, painter David Hockney was in London feeling listless. Or at least he was according to Jack Hazan’s 1974 documentary, A Bigger Splash, which portrays Hockney as a lovesick, indecisive genius. The original NYTimes review of Hazan’s film called it “unforgivably solemn, something that Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey would never have allowed.” And it is solemn, sort of bathed in angsty mysteriousness and bogged down by its violin-heavy soundtrack. But a few scenes manage to take themselves seriously, and feel easy and honest at the same time. At one point, Hockney is laying in a dimly lit, orange-ish room beside Celia Birtwell, a designer and intermittent muse, speaking limply about a “cure”—a cure, the film suggests, from his distress over trouble with lover Peter Schlesinger, but also just a cure in general.

Says Hockney, “That’s what I should do. I should go for a cure to California. Treat it like a spa. Yeah. But what can we drink?” He continues, “I’m always going back to the same places. I find myself always going to California. . .  I haven’t been to some place really different for a long time. I mean other than Japan.”

“You went to Corsica,” points out Celia.

“It wasn’t that different. And going back to California to work, I don’t know. There’s something about it that’s off-putting, and then there’s something about it that’s quite exciting. I suspect that in the four years since I left, it’s changed probably.” That it had changed since Hockney left seems fairly certain—L.A.’s good at change, which in part drew Hockney to the city back in ’63 (“You are the painter of Southern California now,” a friend tells him, and only a place in flux can have a transplant for its painter). “I don’t suppose I’ll ever stay,” he muses. “Even when I liked it, I never felt like staying.” Celia agrees, roughing his hair. “No, I think that fantasy’s all burnt out,” she says.

“I don’t know. I’m not so sure. I wish I was convinced it was all burnt out,” replies Hockney. A few scenes later, he’s back painting clear blue California pools, once again surrounded by Palm Trees.

Florian Maier-Aichen, left, "Untitled," 2007, courtesy Blum & Poe; right, "The Best General View," courtesy Gagosian.

What I am surrounded by right now is sofa cushions, and I have Hazan’s Hockney film playing in a small window in the bottom left corner of my screen while I art-view. I’m browsing the VIP Art Fair, the first online fair of it’s kind, the first “to mobilize the collective force of the world’s leading contemporary art galleries with the unlimited reach of the Internet,” according to its press release. Artnet claims VIP creates “the same initial disorientation” one feels at any other art fair, only, this time, you can feel it while sitting on your sofa.

Perhaps because I am thinking of Hockney’s musings on California’s push and pull, or because I need a familiar foothold, I am experiencing a weird surge of regionalism, which seems counter intuitive at an online fair. Finding L.A. at VIP is actually a harder task than you’d expect, however, as only three of the included galleries are actually from here—David Kordansky, Susan Vielmetter Projects and Blum & Poe. L & M doesn’t count because it only arrived in L.A.  this year and has been in N.Y. for going on two decades, and nothing about Gagosian is specific to its Beverly Hills space.

Of course, it doesn’t take an L.A. gallery to show L.A. artists, and Ingrid Calame, Sharon Lockhart, Chris Burden, and Walead Beshty, among others, make appearances in virtual booths of International and East Coast galleries. But it’s a certain kind of artist that works in this sort of on-screen environment.

David Hockney, a self-portrait, still life, and summer dawn, made with the iPhone Brushes application, 2009.

Critic-poet Eileen Myles “instantly coined a phrase” upon seeing the 2006 Wolfgang Tillmans show at the Hammer Museum. She called it “browser art”, “which is to simply render how [a person] moves through the world, . . .  what an eye might alight on, what kind of people do we like to look at.” This sort of approach works well in the online context and Tillmans turns out to be decently represented here (he has five works on view at VIP, and only a few–like Louise Bourgeois–have more); however, in my search for L.A. artists, I find two whose browser-window appeal differs slightly from Tillmans’ but still seems on-spot.

The first is Florian Maier-Aichen, the German-born photographer who makes large format, seductive panoramas and who might, upon first glance, seem more performer than browser. But his oversaturated, sweeping views evidence an implicit understanding of how color works in digitally-savvy brains, and how simple shifts in hue can grab you and pull you back into sublime fantasies that became mundane when aerial views became second nature. He has a blue cityscape/horizon scene in Blum & Poe’s booth that looks like one still, perfectly confined special effect. The other is Karl Haendel, whose Cause and Prevention of Old Age Group (2010), shown by Tel Aviv’s Sommer Contemporary, acts as free association in pencil on paper. Film still with man (Gary Cooper) in long black vest pointing gun, next to long black industrial silhouettes, next to sea of bullets, next to white on black criss-crossed clippings: “Crossing Guard Is Charged,” Officials are Unable,” “Friend Skittish in Center Aisle.” Again, you can read the image across quickly, like stream of consciousness or—and I did this repeatedly—zoom in real close then scroll across, getting lost in the progression of details.

Years after he made a name as “painter of California,” David Hockney discovered the iPhone. He started using the brush app to make quick drawings (though he’d often spend hours strategizing before each) with an intuitive approach to color as immediate as Maier-Aichen’s, though a free associative quality less refined than Haendel’s. He told friend and biographer Lawrence Weschler, “the images always look better on the screen than on the page. After all, this is a medium of pure light, not ink or pigment, if anything more akin to a stained glass window than an illustration on paper.” He found “something, finally, very intimate about the whole process.”  I guess that can be said about the best work to see at VIP: it has a specific sort of intimacy when experienced onscreen. But I’m pretty sure Google image could have told us that.

Thomas Edison, "Fun in a Bake Shop," film still, 1902.

Stop motion lends itself to stilted narratives about creativity. Some of the earliest films for which the frame-by-frame technique was used tell stories about eccentric characters making something almost as eccentric as themselves. In Thomas Edison’s 1902 project, Fun in a Bakery, a baker smothers a rat he sees with a glob of dough, then proceeds to sculpt that dough into a robust face; for some reason, his effort gets him thrown headfirst into a barrel of flour by other men in baker’s hats. In J. Stuart Blackton’s 1907 film, The Haunted Hotel, a table is set by invisible hands that go on to create an exquisite, frightening evening for a tired traveler.

Blum & Poe’s current exhibition, called Stop. Move., attempts to show that this storied, low-tech medium is just as possibility-rich today as it was a century ago, or at least as compelling. It includes four artists, three based in Berlin (at least part of the time) and one based in Los Angeles. Each has been given a single darkened gallery space, and the films by Hirsch Perlman, Robin Rhode, and Nathalie Djurberg are projected onto a single wall, while Matt Saunders’ three-channel installation takes up two additional walls and occupies Blum & Poe’s biggest gallery. Because three of four films have soundtracks, the music that bleed from one gallery to the next become a tainted cohesive, causing the work to mingle and mesh in unexpected ways–the Johnny Cash and Miles Davis tracks paired with Perlman’s film add to the comic effect of Rhode’s work, while Djurberg’s music makes everything else in the show more portentous.

Matt Saunders, "Kuhle Wampe Bikes 108," Edition of 3, 2010. Courtesy of Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York.

Something about the Stop. Move. feels old, and while this has to do with stop motion’s datedness and visual simplicity, it also has to do with the fact that the artists have chosen to present fairly basic, unencumbered narratives. This isn’t a bad thing, and the exhibition’s two most engrossing works narrate stories about creativity that fails. In Robin Rhode’s Canon, a man wearing a sweat suit and red beanie sketches a television on a blank white wall. He then spends the duration of the film trying to “kill” his sketch, by shooting and then exploding it. The problem is that each weapon he draws quickly dissolves into a dirty sea of abstract marks or disappears altogether. Finally, giving up on the canon he’s tried to use, he drags a canon ball across the wall, manhandling it until it collisides with the television. This sort of frustrated effort to make something (or make something work) translates beautifully to the “start, stop and repeat” nature of stop motion.  And even if Rhode’s experiment in failure does veer a bit close to William Kentridge’s charcoal-drenched, foible-filled approach to animation (an acknowledged influence), his nonchalance sets him apart.

Nathalie Djurberg, Still from "We are not two, we are one," clay animation, digital video 5:33, Edition of 4, 2008. Music by Hans Berg. Courtesy of Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Giò Marconi, Milan.

Nathalie Djurberg’s We are not two, we are one steals the show with its lyrically tender weirdness. The Swedish artist’s claymation always feels like the perverse version of Wallace and Grommit; it has a visual wholesomeness that its subject matter totally destabilizes. In this film, a wolf with a slight blond girl growing out of his lower spine navigates a kitchen, making some sort of meal. At first, wolf and girl seem to coexist effectively, though the she tends to pick up after him and finish tasks he starts. Yet the wolf becomes progressively less considerate, and the film ends with both characters naked, battered and in tears. The ever-increasing intensity of Hans Berg’s music, composed specifically for this film, enhances the story line’s formidability, making you feel always on the brink of panic. The characters never finish making their dinner, and the kitchen is left a mess.

It’s not necessarily clear how the four artists in  Stop. Motion. inform each other, but sometimes such  looseness is okay. In the end, the exhibition seems to suggest what we already knew: any medium, wielded by a clever and thoughtful maker can be a success. That stop motion is a strategy artists continue to explore simply means they are keeping their options open.