2008 California Biennial.
Markle, Leslie
2008 CALIFORNIA BIENNIAL
Orange County Museum of Art | Newport Beach
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The 2008 California Biennial (through March 15) offered an array of
divergent works from the landscape of contemporary California art. As
the only institution dedicated exclusively to this genre, OCMA occupies
a unique position among Southern California museums, many of which are
struggling to maintain their very existence in the current economic
climate. Guest curator Lauri Firstenberg took a somewhat self-reflexive
approach in this installment, which circles dialogically around the
notion of the biennial itself. Featuring works by more than 30 artists
onsite and, for the first time, by a dozen or so at off-site venues from
Tijuana to Northern California, the survey challenged the more
traditional tactic where the host museum generally calls all the shots.
Not surprisingly, for much of the work on display, Firstenberg, who is
also director of LA><ART, a nonprofit space in the tony Culver
City art district, drew upon her own stable of artists. This tends to
put a slightly ironic twist on the notion of access, which is
purportedly challenged by this curatorial mission, and perhaps calls
into question the appropriateness of OCMA's significant allocation
of resources to the exhibition given the state's economical woes.
At first glance, CB08 seemingly abandons any semblance of
continuity in favor of a mixed assortment of works ranging from
object-based installation to new genre video pieces, which, on the
surface, have little affinity with one another. Looking for Mushrooms
(195965/1996), a 14-minute digitized video loop by Bruce Connor, is
arguably one of the most visually compelling of these latter offerings.
The work's jerky passage across lusciously dilapidated surfaces
mimics the action painting of the time, but here it is paired with a
counter-culturally inspired slideshow of nuclear weapons testing at
Bikini Atoll between 1946 and 1958.
The CB08 off-site activities ranged from San Francisco and 29 Palms
to sites in the more immediate vicinity, many of them reflecting the
show's civic outreach. A fine example of the latter are Sam
Durant's untitled banners, located in and around Newport Beach,
which ask, among others, "Who is the illegal alien, pilgrim?",
parodying the typically sunny slogans that often dot the city. Marcos
Ramirez ERRE's Ice Tower (2008) foregrounds the political discourse
surrounding the U.S./Mexican border, which offers a live camera feed to
the museum from a water tower located a hundred yards from this highly
contested no-man's land.
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Many of the object-based works in OC08 exemplify the potential
claim that SoCal artists might possibly be the leaders in the creation
of a peculiar type of discursive artifact, which combines aesthetic
sophistication with social engagement. Ruben Ortiz Torres's
customized scissor lift, contextually appropriate in the geographic
heart of low-rider culture, fetishizes the aesthetics of car culture,
celebrating its style in a utilitarian object emblematic of labor,
resulting in a wry send-up of Latino stereotypes. Kara Tanaka's
mesmerizing kinetic sculpture, Crushed By the Hammer of the Sun (2008),
explores the transcendental possibilities of the machine by appealing to
the limbic brain with an endlessly rotating, almost dancing silk cloth.
Finally, Jedediah Cesar's Helium Brick (2008) is the latest version
of the post-minimalist sculptural object (a giant epoxy-coated lump of
Styrofoam), which was driven around Los Angeles in the back of a pickup
truck. The result is something akin to Kim Abeles's smog drawings.
The broad offerings of this biennial foregrounded the important
role that SoCal artists have played in shaping the discourse of
contemporary art, making a case for the region's continuing
viability as a sprawling art metropolis. It is also emblematic of the
central role that OCMA plays in advancing this discourse, even in these
difficult times. Let's hope that the museum may continue to do so
in future biennial installments.
