Courtesy the artist and Roberts and Tilton, Culver City, California.

Jeremy Everett, "Untitled (Porn Mag #1)" (2008). Pornographic magazine and Borax crystals, 12 x 16 1/2 x 3 in.

October 2008 Reviews

Manifesta 7

Jeff Koons

Chantal Akerman

Painting: Now and Forever, Part II

Erkka Nissinen

Elaine Duigenan

Kerry James Marshall

Peter Saul

John Massey

Bridget Riley

Pipilotti Rist

Thomas Helbig

Armando Andrade Tudela

Gary Hume

Marine Hugonnier

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

Colors popped and got a bit pornographic in Rivington Arms’ summer group show, organized by California-raised curator Benjamin Provo. And as befits the vague longings that often constitute that long hot season, an elusive streak (with heat) ran through the works by the six young, mostly LA-based artists on view. The exhibition’s title used Gertrude Stein’s much-employed maxim (referring to the California of her childhood) as a comment on the theme of intangibility that connected the works in various media by Kathryn Andrews, Jeremy Everett, and Luke Whitlatch, among others. Despite their conceptual opacity, the works enjoined a loose, easy way with abstraction and materiality that spoke to a playful interest in craft, while imbuing it with more illicit (and color-coded) cravings. Andrews’s tall plank, coated in stripes of lemon yellow, cherry red, and cerulean blue, leaned languidly against the wall across from a torn-out page listing French texts on male child prostitution. Pedestals offered a selection of porn mags frozen within crystallized encasements in glittery rainbow hues. These lewd historical artifacts by Everett read as though some guy had dropped his stash in the salton sea and discovered it decades later, a calcified, beauteous tomb to dully familiar desire. More restrained was Whitlatch’s series of white canvases (Flight of the Carrion Crow), which featured gaps where the canvas had been peeled back to reveal mouth-or aperture-like voids lined in bright turquoise. While the materials were fashionably abject, it was the ambiguous desire (sexual and cerebral) shaping the works that set them apart from any number of other summer shows where artists utilized cultural detritus to formal ends. Like the City of angels, Provo’s exhibition was a study in dichotomies: attraction and repulsion, beauty and decay, rigor and plasticity. In turn, the viewer was left with a kind of candy-colored noir, a sensibility at once bright and very, very dark.

"There is No There There" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.