Exterior view of "Fast Service While You Wait" at Venice 6114. Image copyright Venice 6114.

‘From work to event. We are the mould, it’s up to you to breathe substance into it’

I’ll admit it, I’ve been bored when it comes to art lately. Too many shows with too much text (either on the labels, in the press release, or as part of the artist’s statment)—and I’m too aware of the narrative, too aware of climax and dénouement for the opening lines of the first paragraph to do their job and draw me in.

While I’ve seen a few good shows, I’ve seen a greater number of indistinguishable ones. My current viewing routine has calcified to the point that I’m usually in and out of a medium-sized gallery in under five minutes, and sometimes even under one. I’m not bragging. I am full of reticence and pain from past shows that led me on, suspicious as to art’s motives.

Last night, however, the first big night back for Los Angeles after the holidays, the New Year, and the winter blahs, I found new hope. It started with Judith Bernstein, Carolee Schneemann, and Barbara Smith, all speakers on a panel about painting at the Box Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. Each woman told the story of her entrance into the field, and for each woman, the lack of female colleagues and a excessively (if not repressively) masculine mise en scène featured heavily. I know things are far from perfect when it comes to gender equality in the arts circa 2013, but I believe that when female artists from today sit on tomorrow’s panels, issues of gender will not automatically be the first thing to emanate from each and every set of lips.

Tyler Calkin, Sarah Petersen, and Adam Peña, "Fast Service While You Wait," 2013.

Mixed in with Bernstein, Schneemann, and Smith were a few of their male counterparts, including Paul McCarthy, who raised my spirits for a different reason. As he describe moving from burning early works to painting with his body, he made it clear that his choices weren’t “from an understanding of historical continuation,” but from the kind of thoughts that come when one is invested in a medium, like “well, what next…should I use my shit to paint?” McCarthy’s candid and humor-laden discussion of the role of instinct and materiality in an artist’s decision process caught me off guard and gave me great satisfaction.

McCarthy’s comments about burning his paintings to find true black also set up my drive west along the 10 freeway, where the bulk of the evening’s openings were. In the sky was the smallest crescent of a silver moon, but the rest of the moon was there, too, a perfect, light black circle against the deeper, velvet black of the rest of the night sky. The moon stayed with me until Culver City, where I lost my ability to stargaze due to the press of bodies demanding my attention on the ground.

Tyler Calkin, Sarah Petersen, and Adam Peña, "Fast Service While You Wait," 2013.

The shows this month offer a little bit of everything, from painting and sculpture to photography. I stuck to my one- to five-minute routine, for the most part, stopping longer in some spaces, like Kim Fisher’s show at International Art Objects and Bernard Piffaretti at Cherry + Martin, and mentally marking others for return. But instead of feeling let down and disappointed, I was beginning to feel invested again.

The last stop was Venice 6114, a former auto repair shop turned into a gallery/project space, organized by artist Sergio Bromberg. The large door to the main part of the old shop was missing; anyone who walked by could see inside. The phrase “Feel the vibrations while you wait” was painted in huge blue letters against a bright yellow wall. An area was set aside for cars, and artist Tyler Calkin (who co-created the piece with Sarah Petersen and Adam Peña) explained to me that the project’s main point was to offer a very personalized form of tire inflation: Calkin et al had equipped a slew of orange construction hats with plastic tubing, with each hat able to connect to the others. When a car came in, the hats went on, and the person nearest the wall connected the entire chain to the facility’s compressor.

Called “Fast Service While You Wait,” the inflation wasn’t particularly fast, or even one hundred percent effective. Rather, it was a way of grouping strangers, connecting them with what Lygia Clark once called “relational objects,” asking them to investigate the areas where we all overlap and “meet in the world.” It was clunky, but well-intended, and in the end it helped me (in combination with the panel discussion earlier) to re-engage with buried thoughts on art and the arts community. Definitely imperfect, oft times disappointing, but when you know where to look, so earnestly invested in challenging and inspiring that I keep coming back to it.

In 2006, the Musée des Beaux-Arts held a Lygia Clark exhibit entitled “From work to event. We are the mould, it’s up to you to breathe substance into it.” Sometimes things are plotted and reasoned, other times accidental, but regardless, it’s the job of the arts writer, of the artist, of the viewer and participant, to breathe that substance into whatever we identify “it” to be. With passion, people.

Still from the opening sequence of Linklater's Slackers (1991)

Did you ever read Jack Bankowsky’s 1991 Artforum essay on slacker art? It’s a pretty good one, called “Slackers” after Richard Linklater’s very slack, brilliantly drawn-out film, also called Slackers and out in ’91. Linklater’s film begins with a monologue by a young guy (played by Linklater) with a bowl cut. He leaves a bus station in a taxi, describing a dream he had on the bus to a driver who really doesn’t care: “I was just traveling around, staring out the windows of buses . . . flipping through channels, reading. I mean how many dreams do you have when you read? Man, there was this book that I read — or, it was my dream, so I probably wrote it or something — but the premise was that every thought you have creates its own reality.” So, like, in The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy and the Scarecrow try to decide which way to go, every way they don’t choose becomes an alternate life path they take in an alternate dimension.

Bankowsky, who was about to be Editor-in-Chief of Artforum then, starts his essay with a description of Linklater’s film and of the slacker in general: “everyone speaks a debased or hybrid argot, worships at their own jerry-built altar, proselytizes for a private religion. . . . The slacker is the flip side of the hyperfunctional persona Madonna presents in Truth or Dare. . . . doomed to wander an affectless void unredeemed.” Linklater’s film is the perfect example of Slacker art because his “camera is just as hapless as the subject it focuses on,” but there are a number of visual artists too who, instead of being the flip side of Madonna, are antidotes to the super slick ‘80s artists of which Jeff Koons remains the best known. These artists — Karen Kilimnik, Jack Pierson, Laurie Parsons — have “a nose for the fissures in this dream of surface.”

Laurie Parsons' sculpture Troubled (1989).

The best part of Bankowsky’s essay comes about four pages in, when he briefly tricks us into thinking Laurie Parsons is the villain of the slacker trend (read the piece “Dematerial Girl” too, by the way, about the disappearance of Parsons from the art world). He has just praised Pierson for seediness and shiftlessness and fracturing, when he turns to Parsons’ 1990 installation “Stuff” of junk from her mother’s closet. He talks about how her installation “screams hippie,” then about how awful she can sound when talking about her art. “When she talks about her work/life, her language is littered with icky humanist sentences,” Bankowsky writes, and gives a few examples about how Parsons uses the word “honest” or talks about working outside the institution of art. But just as soon as he’s made her sound unaware and sappy, he reminds us that slacker art can have no villain since it doesn’t really stand for anything particular. Parsons is caught in the fissures between art and life, which isn’t a bad place for slacker artists to be, and her inability to articulate herself doesn’t matter at all when her art does its job.

So, it has been 21 years since Linklater and Bankowsky mused about the slacker. Slacker art still pops up pretty often though, sometimes so much that it stops feeling like a cracking or fracturing and starts to feel like the status quo. The most recent instantiation has been slacker minimalism, art of found or weirdly unrelated items put together with the elegance of minimal sculpture: Lara Schnitger, Caroline Thomas, etc. Self-conscious underproduction trumps over production. Is this getting old? Is it time to stop slacking?

Alice Channer, Cigarette Pants (purple) and Cigarette Pants (cream), 2012. Cast and powder-coated aluminum and oak dowels, 2-part . Courtesy Cherry and Martin and the artist.

But occasionally I see a new, kind-of-slack project that excites me with its forcefulness. This happened recently, at Cherry and Martin gallery’s current group show, curated by artist Marc Hundley and called Look Here Upon this Picture. In that show, London-based Alice Channer has these Cigarette Pants hung on dowels. Cigarette pants are usually the slim fit slacks like the ones Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Funny Face. Channer’s are cast powdered aluminum ellipses that must be the approximate circumference of a small waist and legs. They hang from the dowels like loose fabric, listless but specific and smartly made. Can you be hyperfunctional and still wandering, sniffing out fissures?

I remember seeing Channer in a video made by Art Review two or so years ago, walking through an exhibition of hers at The Approach in London.  She stopped by some big sheets of water worn paper she had hung two sheets deep. She pointed to the gap between the two papers — “This gap here is important” — then pointed to the gap between the back paper and the wall — “And this gap here is important.” She said so in a way that made you sure the dream of surfaces is still worth undermining.