Courtesy the artist

Marcos Ramirez, "Hate" (2003). Automotive paint on aluminum plate with vinyl applications, 24x24 in.

Courtesy the artist and LA><Art, Los Angeles

Karl Haendel, "A White Al Sharpton" (2008). Billboard

October 2008 Field Guide

Eugene Carchesio

Cinema Remixed and Reloaded

Dark Continents

Cildo Meireles's Dark Materials

Rivane Neuenschwander

Franz West

Open

Lois and Franziska Weinberger

Tadao Ando's Stone Hill Center

Le Futurisme a Paris

The Tropics: Views From The Middle of The Globe

Nam June Paik Art Center

Museums in the 21st Century: Concepts, Projects, Buildings

Daniel Joseph Martinez Jedediah Caesar Andrea Zittel Raymond Pettibon Karl Haendel Rirkrit Tiravanija Glory Days in L.A. LA MOCA Sees Much-Needed Success at Auction

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Joan Didion once described summer in Southern California thus: “There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.” Thoughts?

The 2008 California Biennial’s exhibition catalogue features an interview by art historian Nizan Shaked with Raymond Pettibon, in which Pettibon discusses his 1989 lithograph bearing the deadpan words I THOUGHT CALIFORNIA WOULD BE DIFFERENT as a response to the mythologizing apparatus surrounding the Golden State. For Pettibon, California operates in a dystopian space that debunks prototypical romanticisms, and this serves as our point of departure for this year’s Biennial. In fact, our aim is to present an exhibition and series of encounters that are unthematic, unspectacular, dense, excessive, and contradictory.

Your biennial exhibits a major generational divide: 20 established artists, such as Mary Kelley and Bruce Conner, positioned on one side, with roughly 30 emerging artists influenced by them (we presume) on the other. This is a far more holistic approach than today’s other biennials, which are typically full of the very young. What led you to this decision?

My first impulse was to break with a fixed focus on emerging artists, a decision that was really solidified during a studio visit with Edgar Arceneaux, during which I was introduced to work inspired by and in collaboration with two established influential LA figures, Morgan Fisher and Charles Gaines [father of My Barbarian member Malik Gaines]. LA’s system of art schools and their particular history, as well as their networks of relationships emanating from art schools—of progenitors and progeny—speak to a condition that is distinctive to California. My desire was to provide another context for the large population of artists sprung from schools throughout the state into the realms of the museum and the market.

What has been your biggest coup so far with this biennial?

We will include several satellite projects for the first time, from San Francisco to Tijuana, Mexico, as a means of moving away from the hermetic nature of past California Biennials, when site and audience were bound to a museum in the suburbs of Orange County. We will use OCMA as a hub for Biennial activity, while we produce a series of projects with partnering venues and interventions into the public domain. Off-site collaborators include artists working in Joshua Tree at High Desert Test Sites [founded by Andrea Zittel]; the artist-run space 533 in downtown LA; nonprofit and university galleries in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco; and temporal experiments in the park, in the street, and in artists’ studios. One of the many projects I’m looking forward to is Daniel Joseph Martinez’s Ishmael work from the Cairo Biennial, which will make its US debut here. The work depicts the artist’s doppelgänger-automaton having an ongoing epileptic seizure, and I think having a hyperfigurative work among an array of formal abstract sculpture should create a curious dialogue. Another exciting project is a CB08 commissioned work by sculptor Jedediah Caesar, who will be taking a monthlong road trip through California. He’ll be collecting debris and materials as he goes. The vehicle will eventually be driven into the museum, where it will be decommissioned and transmutated into a new sculpture.

The California Biennial  in Los Angeles runs from October 26, 2008 through March 15, 2009.

"Firstenberg Curates California" 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.