Andy Warhol. Dennis Hopper, Screen Tests Reel #4, 1964-65.

I spent Sunday looking at boys. It began at LACMA, where I saw Catherine Opie’s quarterbacks, linebackers and surfers  followed by Thomas Eakins’s rowers, wrestlers and athletic but stationary nudes. It continued at the Egyptian Theater, with ten of Andy Warhol’s four-minute screen tests: Buffy Phelps with delicate, defiant eyes and blondish curls; John Giorno of Sleep, darker and rougher than Buffy; Kip “Bima” Stagg, equally dark but not as rough; Dennis Hopper, twenty-eight but looking younger; Hopper again, still near twenty-eight, but suit-clad and looking older; Gregory Battock with Clark Gable jauntiness; Richard Schmidt and Paul Winterbottom; Kenneth King and Richard Markowitz, who, along with Giorno and Hopper, would appear in the compilation The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys.

Because Warhol’s tests are meditative and slow, I lost myself in their static silence, and didn’t think about gender until the reel played out. “They were all men, weren’t they?” I said to the friend sitting next to me. He’d noticed before I had.

Collier Schorr. Jens F., 2005.

Three weeks ago, when Catherine Opie’s unprovocatively titled Figure and Landscape opened, the artist talked about her work in LACMA’s Bing Theater. She mentioned comparisons often made between her sports photographs and the work of Collier Schorr, which depicts, among other things, young male bodies posing and sparring. “Collier wants to be her boys,” said Opie. “I don’t . . . I’m not interested in seeing my butch body through them.” What she’s interested in is bearing witness, and she’s been witnessing a precariously in-between generation, some of which has gone to Iraq, some of which has died.

Being versus bearing is not so simple a distinction, of course—Opie’s boys, as poet-critic Eileen Myles has pointed out, tend to adopt the Opie expression, which resembles a “scary duh.” Even so, it’s possible Schorr wants to be her boys while Opie wants to be aware of her boys; certainly, Eakins wanted to be with his boys while Warhol wanted to collect them.

Thomas Eakins. The Champion Single Sculls, 1871. Courtesy LACMA.

It’s Warhol and Schorr who most prominently prefer male subjects. Warhol’s Screen Test Reel #5 includes only two women and, like Reel #4, Reel #6 is an exclusive boy’s club. Schorr, when asked why she doesn’t photograph girls, has said she does; she just uses boys to do it. But the strange, sports-focused mannishness of the paired Opie-Eakins exhibitions is even stranger in light of both artists’ genuine interest in women. Opie’s girl-only Girlfriends series showed at Gladstone Gallery in New York last year, and Eakins consistently included women in his work, and even in his controversies. It was his uninhibited disrobing in front of female students and his insistence on the removal of a male model’s “loin cloth” during a drawing session women attended, not his obsession with his “beloved” (as one wall label reads) young men, that forced him to resign from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1886.

Catherine Opie. Untitled #10 (Surfers), 2003. Courtesy Regen Projects.

In Manly Pursuits and Figure and Landscape, Eakins and Opie, both realists, show themselves to be exquisite technicians with a virtuosic, if predictable, eye for poetic composition. In Eakins’s The Champion Single Sculls, a burnt sienna scull cuts smoothly across royal-blue water and its inhabitant looks elegantly, if illogically, casual as he turns to look back. In Opie’s portraits, skin, eyes, pose, gaze, the position of the football helmet, have all been carefully considered; royal blue makes frequent appearances in her work as well. But both artists render the trappings of a conventional masculinity and gender-play to which neither quite belong—to which no one quite belongs—and it’s the work that revels in inaction that seems most gaping and honest.

A room at the back of Figure and Landscape features only surfing images, and, though Opie has made striking portraits of the surfers she’s shadowed, none of those portraits are included here. Instead, there’s just expansive gray rectangles in which far-off bodies float, largely unmoving, waiting for a chance to resume their sport. They’re certainly skilled surfers; everyone Opie photographs seems to be good at what they do. They’re also like little pawns or bobbing black buoys. They don’t look volitional but they do look comfortable; like the artist who made them, they’re virtuosic and yet awkward precisely because they’re virtuosic.

A screenshot of Jean Harlow in her bedroom in Dinner at Eight

David Batchelor, in his exquisite little pink book Chromophobia, describes a white he encountered on the walls of the home of an “Anglo-American art collector” he visited in the 1990s. He wrote, “There is a kind of white that repels everything that is inferior to it, and this is that kind of white. . . This white was aggressively white. It did its work on everything and nothing escaped.” Batchelor goes on to wonder, could we hold the architect who designed this home responsible? This architect wanted to “strip bare and to make pure,” to construct minimal, “very direct” buildings in which there was “’no possibility of lying’ because they are ‘just what they are’.” Says  Batchelor, “He was lying of course, telling big white lies. . .” That terrifying sort of white does not free anything or anyone up to be themselves, though it might put their features and flaws into sharp relief.

View of the Mary Corse installation at Ace Gallery.

I am thinking of white because of two exhibitions I saw last week. The first, Billy + Jean by Margaret Haines and Orlando Tirado, in the L.A. Koreatown space Commonwealth & Council, announces itself with a white-on-white work hung in a white-walled corridor which may have been a closet once (Commonwealth & Council is upstairs in an old office complex and, like in many old building, it’s sometimes hard to tell exactly what nooks and crannies in the space were originally meant for). This work lists, in white lettering, all the whites that appeared in Jean Harlow’s bedroom in Dinner at Eight (1933), the bedroom in which the starlet, dressed in a shiny white robe, called Wallace Beery a “dumb bunny.” That bedroom is not the least bit austere. But it is full of white. According to Haines and  Tirado, these were the whites in Harlow’s bedroom:
OYSTER WHITE
LACQUER WHITE ORNAMENTED IN DEAD CHALK WHITE
CREAM WHITE
TRANSLUSCENT ALABASTER-WHITE
MILK WHITE
METALLIC WHITE
WARM WHITE
IVORY-WHITE IN THE TAFFETA

Altogether, these whites seem indulgent — there are too many of them for the whiteness to feel at all minimal. The show Billy + Jean, its title from a 1968 Michael McClure play in which Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid become entangled, sprawls out from there, with a shrink-wrapped, rectangular amalgam of clothing and cardboard and books and wigs on the floor, and against the far wall a found object trellis. The trellis is also painted white, but not perfectly and not with a perfect white shade. This white is more like a primer, sort of gritty and warmer than cold.

Mary Corse, "Untitled," 2011. Glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas.

The second instance of white-on-white art I saw this week was at Ace Gallery L.A. , that labyrinthine space on the second floor of the Wilshire Tower that has far more confusing crannies than Commonwealth & Council does. In her recent paintings, Mary Corse mixed glass microspheres in white acrylic paint, and then painted strips of differently glassy white down her canvases. This means texture and shimmer vary slightly within each painting.

I have seen Corse’s all-white paintings at Ace before, but in bigger, squarer galleries. Right now, they hang in a curved room at the far eastern end of the gallery. A vintage window with white-tinted glass curves around in the middle of the room, and the track lighting hits the paintings in just the right places. If you walk around the room clockwise, staying about a few feet away from the wall, you’ll see the stripes of white on the canvas disappear completely, then reappear, then start to explicitly shine, then fade away again. I like that white could give you a multitude of experiences and that the idea of white as purifying and austere is something we’ve imposed on it.

A U-streamed image from the July 12 Art Walk mayhem.

I wasn’t there last night when L.A.’s downtown Art Walk, held monthly, turned into a stand-off with police. Instead, I was on my couch, three miles away, watching it all on CBS News’ U-stream and following updates on twitter. I dozed off when there were hardly any stragglers left on the street, just a line of police across Spring Street, waiting for orders on what to do next. The voice narrating the U-stream, who sounded like the kind of guy who always sides with the underdog but isn’t always sure which side the underdog side is, was frustrated by the whole situation (“They’re going to find out this is all a big misunderstanding,” he said). He was listening to police scanners, and telling us what he heard: “What they’re saying is, they’re just going to walk away. The cops are going to leave and let the traffic come through.”

Organizers affiliated with the Occupy L.A. movement had apparently decided to stage a peaceful, creative demonstration during the July 12 Art Walk. Some activists had been arrested for chalking political messages on sidewalks in previous weeks, and a pastel colored invitation distributed via facebook said, “Free Chalk for Free Speech, Come Decorate at Chalk Walk.”

The story, according to reports published online this morning, is that Chalk Walk did indeed happen – people wrote messages like, “Prisons are overpopulated and chalking is harmless” on Spring Street sidewalks, between 5^th and 6^th  Street. Then there was melee, but I still can’t quite fill the gap between the chalking and the rubber bullets, injured cops, LAPD choppers and arrests. Yesterday, the forced resignation of MOCA’s chief curator caused famed artist John Baldessari to leave the museum’s board, so artist Dominic Quagliozzi jokingly tweeted, “Artworld rioting over Schimmel firing, set off by Baldessari resigning from MOCA board.” But of course, no one there was there because of Schimmel. Tweeted Charles Davis, “It’s cool how LAPD is flying multiple helicopters with searchlights because people drew on the ground with chalk.” A moment later, he tweeted again: “And just got jabbed hard in the back by a cop while complying with their order to vacate the intersection. #occupyla #Chalkwalk”

Karen Finley in front of the Supreme Court.

When I went to look for news about last night’s craziness, I went first to the L.A. Time’s arts page, just instinctively – Art Walk, chalk; it’s all art-related. But of course, the newspaper’s not-so-helpful stories appeared in the local news section.

Because artist Karen Finley will be performing in Chinatown a week from tomorrow as part of the more-or-less annual Perform Chinatown event, I spent part of yesterday reading old news stories about the National Endowment for the Arts controversies she had been involved in. It’s perverse to have nostalgia for 1990, when NEA grants were being taken away because senator Jesse Helms and friends were complaining about art’s obscenity, but I do want to see more art on front pages or in section “A.”

Timothy Greenfield Sanders, from "The Chocolate Shoot" with Karen Finley.

In the Karen Finley performance that made Jesse Helms particularly mad, Finley–moved by the story of a 15-year-old who was raped, covered in feces, than accused of making it all up–covered her own body in dark chocolate. Helms found this gross and indecent, and even disrespectful to women, as if Finley was committing an assault by responding to one. In 1998, after Finley lost her funding, and after she and other artists who had challenged the law that required “public values” be upheld by work receiving government grants, she did a reprise of the chocolate performance and she held a news conference during it. Still covered in chocolate, she said she had cried when she heard the ruling. “Having a start in the arts is going to be more dependent on coming from inherited wealth or making propaganda,” she said, according to the New York Times, “or being a straight white male.” Young artists who want to take risks will suffer most, she said. Has this happened? Has art retreated into safety, taking on the role of cushioned commenter more often than out-there actor?

James Dean and Natalie Wood on the set of Rebel Without a Cause.

A 29-nine-year-old man in a Mercedes Benz led cops on a high-speed chase a week ago, traveling across four L.A. freeways and ending up on surface streets. He hit three cars and injured five people, including himself and a three-year-old boy who had been a passenger in an SUV. The reckless driver apologized “from the bottom of my heart” for hurting the boy. “I would never disrespect no one’s child,” he reportedly said. He said other things too as cops cuffed him. In video footage from Fox 11, he declares, “I am Vardan Aslanyan and I got swag.” His eyes are wide and concerned, and he’s wearing a perfectly white t-shirt, that, in the intense lights flashing from cameras, headlights and police cars, makes him glow. “Why did you lead cops on this chase?” asks a reporter. “Because I’ve got swag and I wanted to make it look good,” Aslanyan answers with the intense sort of sincerity you might employ if saying, “I had to. There was no other way.”

“Are you on drugs,” the same reporter wants to know. “No, sir,” says Aslanyan. The reporter tries again: “Do you take drugs or alcohol?”  “What is drugs?” asks Aslanyan, and he still has that serious, wide-eyed look. He must be on something, or maybe he’s newly off something. Either way, his delusion has completely engulfed him, and this makes him compelling to watch, despite the fact that he’s just done something egregious.

Harmony Korine, Caput, 2011, still with James Franco at the center.

The scenes from Aslanyan’s arrest reminded me of James Franco’s recent art world contribution, Rebel, a show backed by MOCA and held offsite in a Hollywood building owned by furniture dealer JF Chen. The show features work by Paul McCarthy, Aaron Young, Harmony Korine, and others, including Franco, and was inspired by the 1955 Nicolas Ray film, Rebel Without a Cause. That film stars James Dean, of course, and has a high-speed race in it, which ends with the death of a too-cool-for-school kid named Buzz. Dean himself died at high speeds, and a ruined replica of the car his car hit stands erect at the entrance to the MOCA show.

But I think it was Aslanyan’s white t-shirt that triggered the comparison. Franco wears one in the film Harmony Korine directed for Rebel, though Franco’s t-shirt has a black and white head of James Dean on the front. In Korine’s film — and a number of other works in the show — Franco appears as James Dean, or as Franco-as-James-Dean, since this show revels in everything “meta.” He and an army of women on bmx bikes are about to take on the gang of Sal Mineo (Mineo played “Plato” in Rebel without a Cause), also all female. The women get naked and wield machetes, murdering each other as blood accumulates. The men face off, too, and Franco beheads his rival.

It was all shot in a downtown L.A. parking lot, but at JF Chen’s space, it plays inside a bungalow like those at the Chateau Marmont, where director Nicolas Ray stayed while filming the original Rebel. Ray and Natalie Wood (Dean’s costar in Rebel without a Cause) are rumored to have had an affair in this bungalow, and Franco’s exhibition is full of sleekly fabricated, replicated bungalow. Videos, including one where Paul McCarthy gives a Natalie Wood look-alike a bath in goo, screen in most. When the show opened on May 14, the bungalows had clean facades. But as of June 5^th, the exhibition had been “vandalized,” blood red pigment splattered all over, obscenities painted over doorways and blow-up sex dolls scattered around the pool area (which the show has to make its site really resemble a hotel) and the landscaping. There’s a lot of red splatter.

Installation view of Rebel, post vandalism.

This kind of vandalism feels like a privileged, adolescent attempt at rebellion, like the kid who rebels by destroying his own expensive toys. These artists have a great space, and a budget. But while they’ve scraped the surface of the covert relationships and weirdness that lurk beneath an iconic, cinematic idea of rebellion, they can’t get much deeper because there’s so little subtlety in their tool box, and there might not be much sincerity either. No one involved in the Rebel show can possibly believe red paint that looks like blood taps into the psychological aimlessness and angst that made James Dean’s rebel iconic, can they?

Remember that scene where Dean and Wood are sitting under a tree and Wood tells Dean he shouldn’t believe what she says when she’s with the rest of the kids? “Nobody acts sincere,” she says, and then Dean kisses her on the forehead, a gesture that reminds us the rebellion Dean, Wood and Sal Mineo channeled in 1955 wasn’t actually “without cause.” The characters didn’t feel they belonged to the world they saw around them and so were hiding out from that world’s insincerity with each other.

While the Rebel show at JF Chen closes tomorrow night, those of you in L.A. can see a better, subtler extension of it, Rebel Dabble Babble, at the Box LA in Little Tokyo through June 7.

Charles Brittin, "Shirley Berman at the Ocean Park Pier," 1956.

Last night, at a bar beneath a Motel 8 on Sunset and Western, a friend and I got sucked into a great, mammoth of a Jukebox that’s quirky selection reminded us of a history short enough that our lives had overlapped with much of it, but long enough that many of the bands and artists on its sometimes hand-written leafs had receded so far back into memory we had to dig to pull them out—the Violent Femmes, for instance. Was that really the name of the band that gave Clare Danes’ precious “I’m free” moment in My So Called Life its infectious tempo?

Two Jukebox-like exhibitions are open in L.A. right now—one by a late artist who quietly lived through Venice Beach’s era of Beats, and another by an artist who’s lost himself in punk’s knotty trajectory by channeling a man whose whole life was colorful and loud, whether he meant it to be or not. Both are rich with real and fantastic historical gems, some as thrilling to [re]experience as the Violent Femmes and others a bit more ominous.

Charles Brittin (1928 – 2011) came to L.A. from Iowa at the end of the 1940s. Brittin fell in with Wallace Berman, the pensive artist who shunned the gallery world after an anonymous tip prompted police to raid his first-ever exhibition in search of pornography, and his crew of meditative, anti-establishment friends. The pictures Britton took of this group are among the best in West & South at Michael Kohn Gallery, a show that’s more encyclopedic than thematic, pairing Britton’s images of the California scene with his iconic photographs of the Civil Rights movement. The Venice pics are good because, unlike the gripping, clearly weighty photos of protests and demonstrations, they get at the quirky moments that make history seem like the pastiche of idiosyncrasies that it really is. A portrait of Wallace Berman’s wispy wife Shirley hangs right by the gallery’s front entrance and also graces the cover of the exhibition catalog. Shirley’s upturned hands glow in the Venice Beach sun, her eyes cross slightly, and she looks like an unsuspecting Joan of Arc who’s just been possessed by the spirit, her unruly hair flying up toward heaven.

Steven Bankhead, “Sex: A Monument to Malcolm McLaren,” 2011. Courtesy Emma Gray Headquarters, Los Angeles.

If unruly hair indicates inspiration, it would explain the success of Malcolm McLaren—manager to the Sex Pistols, among other sundry trades—and his complicated on-and-off partner, Vivienne Westwood. Both had short, curly locks that seemed to take on a life of their own, regardless of how carefully curated the rest of their physiques may have been. Artist Steven Bankhead has tackled the McLaren mystique in his current exhibition at Emma Gray Headquarters in Culver City. And the result is strangely subtle. Even the big, pink “SEX” sign—the gallery had to remove it from its exterior wall due to a neighborhood complaint—that echoes signage McLaren hung outside his London shop feels more adorable than aggressive. Bankhead has covered the walls of Emma Gray’s main space with large print-outs of a London cityscape that depict industrial mayhem in such a perfectly controlled, choreagraphed manner that they feel like what might have resulted if Fellini had rewritten 8 1/2 and set  it during Britain’s Industrial Revolution.

In the gallery’s office, Bankhead has installed a few balloon-ish pop paintings, much lighter in palette than the  black-and-white paper walls, but equally controlled. The paintings mimic those McLaren when still a young aspiring artist, before he’d become entwined with the Sex Pistols and early punk. They’re pink, yellow, orange and blue clouds against flat white or black backgrounds, Warholian and tenderly optimistic.

Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm Mclaren sitting in the Sex Shop, 1976.

Three years before McLaren died ( in 2010, a year ago almost exactly), he gave an interview to the Telegraph in which he described how he felt after becoming a teenage father in the early 70s to Westwood’s baby (she’d apparently spent the money he gave her for an abortion on a cashmere twinset). “I went into depression for a while, then decided to make myself a blue lamé suit, copying Elvis,” he explained, and he got Vivienne to help him. “That was the big change. I realised she was a gifted seamstress,” McLaren added, as if it was then, over the blue lamé meant to free him from his own version of post-partum despondency, that he discovered the fashion icon Vivienne would become.

Steven Bankhead’s light, pop paintings feel like that blue lamé, fun shapes that, if read into, tell a rich, weird story about how culture gets made.