Michel Auder, Cat Stranglers, 2009. Courtesy Kayne Griffin Corcoran.

I had a lazy Monday afternoon two weeks ago. A friend defended her dissertation and then we all migrated from the Inland Empire to my place, where I tried to show video art to one friend while another, the dissertation defender, slept. The internet connection was slow, and so we never finished watching any one work, but the sleeping friend woke and wandered into the living room while Kenneth Tam’s I no longer worry about shoes being worn inside the house was faltering along. “We’re watching two men do invented yoga-like moves,” I said. “But they didn’t know each other — they met on Craig’s List.”

“If they knew each other, it wouldn’t be video art,” she said. “It would be friends doing Yoga.” This was a joke, but one I thought about, because, off the cuff, I couldn’t name any art I’d seen and liked recently that dealt comfortably and explicitly with the familiar. In most new art that compels me, artist hurl themselves into the unfamiliar.

There’s Leigh Ledare and Michel Auder, whose recent, respective exhibitions at The Box L.A. and Kayne Griffin Corcoran mined the eccentricities of their own biographies. But those exhibitions confront you with an idea of intimacy that’s unsettling because of how confessional it is, and how near it veers toward psychological fiction. In some of Auder’s films, he uses hired actors; for some of Ledare’s photographs, he asked women he found through personal ads to pose and dress him so that he embodies their desires.

Robert Smithson, Ithaca Mirror Trail, 1969.

Then there’s Elizabeth Peyton exhibition at Regen Projects, which is delightful and refreshing, as her work always is, because it’s not at all high concept. Peyton’s portraits, of friends and pop culture icons, are just of people she likes. In her work at Regen, she depicts painter Alex Katz sitting with crossed arms on a couch, and a watery-eyed David Bowie staring  from a 14-inch tall panel. You leave thinking about people’s interior lives, of Peyton’s perception of herself and of others. Does Alex Katz really look as stoic and controlled as figures in his own paintings, or has the artist projected a bit? This question isn’t uninteresting, but it’s not an ambitious one either.

James Lee Byars, The Angel, 1989, 125 glass spheres. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery.

Could art about the familiar ever be really daring?

I came across a description of a work James Lee Byars did in tribute to Robert Smithson recently. The two artists, contemporaries in the New York of the 1960s, would have crossed paths and, I imagine, liked each other, but I don’t know how well they personally knew each other. In 1978, five years after Smithson tragic death in a Texas plane crash, James Lee Byars added up the dimensions of all the mirror Robert Smithson used during his career — Smithson used mirrors a lot, lining them up in the landscape to “displace” the earth perceptually or using them in gallery installation. The sum of all Smithson’s mirrors measure 1000 feet by 1360 feet. Byars then took the giant mirror to Smithson’s gravestone, and took a picture of the stone seen through the mirror. This would be “a mirror displacement of Robert Smithson’s soul.” Then Byars purportedly transported the mirror to the Utah desert — I do not know how, or whether any documents exist to prove this actually happened — and used a crane to shatter it across the desert floor. He collected the shards of mirror, packed them in a box embellished with gold leaf, and sent the box to Nancy Holt, who had been Smithson’s wife, as a token of his sympathy. Perhaps this is the ultimate example of the familiar taken to an extreme. Everything about Byars’ tribute speaks to how well he knew and loved Smithson’s art, yet the project is gapingly ambitious.

Dana Verkouteren's rendering of Gregory G. Katsas speaking in front of the Supreme Court Justices in Washington, March 26, 2012.

Driving home on March 28, the last day of the SCOTUS affordable health care hearings, I had the radio on and heard interviews with two or three female picketers who had set up outside the Supreme Court. I haven’t been able  to find the transcript of what I heard, but I remember it as one of those “can you tell who’s on what side” stories — like the one NPR did months ago, comparing the fiscally-obsessed language of a Tea Partier with that of a Wall Street Occupier. The similarity that struck me most between these SCOTUS picketers was the use of “I” and “my”: “my Constitutional right,” “my health,” “I have the freedom.” In an Associated Press piece I read later, a woman said of the health care act, “It is the epitome of being in my face and telling me what I can and can’t do for the rest of my life.”

The “I” and the “my” feel embarrassing: people speaking about what they want, and what they feel they deserve, but doing so in language that aligns them to “a side.” On both sides, the “I” and “my” seem in service to bigger red vs. blue, conservative vs. liberal interests, and, at least in sound bites, the speakers don’t seem aware of how unspecific their “I” sounds.

Leigh Ledare, who became notorious on a very small scale (he’s only had a few solo shows, some of them outside of the U.S., none in L.A. until now) for using his over-intimate relationship with his exceptionally uninhibited mother as his subject, has work at The Box gallery in L.A. right now. And though everything in his fairly extensive exhibition is in some way or another “confessional,” all you understand about the artist’s wants or likes has to do with his voracious interest in other people — he wants, or likes, to know about those who are or have been close to him.

Leigh Ledare, still from The Gift, 2008.

The Gift, fragments of a softcore film Ledare’s former-dancer mother made with friends, plays in a side room at The Box. Ledare’s mother sent him this  footage, apparently “as a gift,” and Ledare pared it down so that no story, only strange encounters between actors and director are left. In the main gallery space, a room-inside-a-room has been built to hold Double Bind, a wide-ranging series of photographs of Meghan Ledare Fedderly, formerly married to Ledare, interspersed with imagery from vintage magazines, postcards, and other such sources. According to an explanation hung near the entrance to the room that holds Double Bind, Ledare invited his ex-wife on a weekend in upstate New York, intending to photograph her. She agreed, but had remarried by the scheduled vacation came around. Ledare and she took the trip, but she and her new husband took the same trip, at Ledare’s request, soon after. Both ex-husband and new husband took the photos that Ledare assembled to make his “artwork,” and the images aren’t that different.

Leigh Ledare, from Double Bind, 2009.

Around the periphery of the makeshift room for Double Bind there are color photographs from Ledare’s Personal Commission series. In each, Ledare poses in costumes, often on or near beds. Women the artist found via personal ads, who had interests and desires that reminded him of his mother’s, have posed him and taken the pictures. Again, he asserts only his appetite for closeness to desires of others. Somehow, this makes him, an artist always putting himself in situations others would run from, seem cautious. Self-assertion, the kind those picketers outside the court plunged into, can make you look naive and exposed, and Ledare sidesteps that potential. It’s why his work fascinates and resonates, but also frustrates.