Around LA

I did some Ess Eff gallery/museum notes last week. Today some sightems from around the Southland...

Dmitri Kozyrev at Cirrus: Kozyrev is a landscape painter who has changed what landscape painting is. If Julie Mehretu paints globalization, Dmitri Kozyrev paints the movement that makes globalization possible.

Americans experience the fruited plain (or the fruited subdivision) at 75 miles per hour. Sometimes we fly over it at six times that speed. So that's how Kozyrev paints it.

Each canvas is made up overlapping planes of color. Among them are distant horizons, some sunny, some cloudy, some dotted with buildings, some not. Strips of road -- or maybe runway -- run through the paintings, appearing to be going somewhere in the distance. Strangely, you can follow them from the inside of the paintings into the foreground, but as they get closer to the viewer they dissolve. Other landscape elements sit amongst the planes: flat farm buildings, smokestacks, freeway overpasses, onramps, valleyes, rock outrcroppings.

American landscape painting has long been about stasis, about sitting and enjoying a pretty scene. Americans do not sit and look at pretty scenes anymore. (Kudos to Cirrus for putting high-res Kozyrevs on their website. As with a lot of painting, small JPEGs don't do it.)

Daniel Dove at Mark Moore: Dove is the perfect example of an equation artist. Richter's squeegy + Kiefer's sunflower + David Schnell's geometry + Michael Wesely's photos of process + Butterfield's horses + Smithson's favorite idea = Daniel Dove. These paintings are amalgamated appropriation as originality. They're too slick, too clean, too pretty, too easy.

Amazingly, it often works. Dove's paintings are about the buildup and then the decay of American environments. Thirty years of entropy happen instantly in one of Dove's paintings. The things he paints, say an Applebee's-style exubran food shack are an amalgamation of styles themselves. (Aside to MM: The painting is 96 inches tall. The JPEG doesn't even make it to 96 pixels.)

Invader at sixspace: An artist named Banksy has been getting a lot of pub by invading art museums and installing fake paintings in galleries. The idea seems kind of lame, the exact kind of thing that a general assignment writer at AP finds exciting, but that everyone else finds tedious.

Much more clever is the work by a French artist who goes by the way-too-gimmicky name Invader. He treats built-up environments, like Los Angeles, as if they were the playing field of a video game. At night, during a recent stay in LA, he drove around the city and 'invading' areas by placing his little tile-and-resin critters on buildings, billboards, signs, and the like. Some critters look straight out of Pac-Man, others like pixellated versions of pop-culture iconography. (And by installing at night, Invader mimics the look-and-feel of early video games, which were made up of colored dots on black fields.) 

If you've driven around Los Angeles in the last week or two you have probably seen Invader's work on LA landmarks, lightposts, on the entire side of a building (somehow), on the boardwalk, or on the beach. I was strangely thrilled to find one on La Cienega, in the Culver City gallery district.

I can't imagine that they feel as right anywhere else. (Invader seems made for the festivalism of the biennial circuit, I suppose. Yawn.) The entertainment industry (+ Eli Broad) runs LA. Movie and TV billboards are everywhere. A few times a year a porn company invades the Sunset Strip with a risque billboard, sucks up the hoped-for publicity, and then limps away. Why shouldn't art invade the urban environment too? (Disclosure: sixspace owners, and art.blogging.la webgods Caryn Coleman and Sean Bonner are good pals.)