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colafisher

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/current-events/anti-monolith-cola-2019-los-angeles-municipal-art-gallery/"></div>The cochineal is a small insect belonging to the suborder Strnorryncha, a division of bugs known more for the color they produce after death, when crushed: natural red #4, also called carmine. Artist Sandy Rodriguez uses the insect to produce its characteristic dye to paint maps of a dystopic, alternative Los Angeles, where skull-faced helicopters circle a Camino Real mission — a mission that has become a contemporary jail.
Rodriguez is one of this year’s recipients of the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship, an award of $10,000 given to eleven mid-career artists from the City of Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs. For visual artists, the grant culminates in a group show at Barnsdall Art Park’s Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG).
This year’s awardees are fearsome. The gallery bursts with large-scale, ambitious projects that each engage the disparate, loud strangeness of life in Los Angeles individually and as an unmistakable whole. The exhibition is emblematic of the dedication of the gallery to their larger project: to support emerging, diverse artists and, in gallery director Isabelle Lutterodt’s words, “to provide Angelenos… with a civic space [to be] self-reflective, where they can turn to wonder.” Free admission and inclusive public programming are one tradition of the gallery, an increasingly rare non-profit municipal offering (LACMA, by contrast, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-lacma-ticket-prices-20171115-story.html">raised its GA price to $20 in 2017</a>). Lutterodt and exhibition curator Ciara Moloney remain singularly focused on the insular, radical legacy of LAMAG in a city recently flooded with the Paramount-Studios art market elite.
In 1927, oil heiress Aline Barnsdall bequeathed her land in a deed to the city that included the Frank Lloyd Wright-built Hollyhock House. The city block was then called Olive Hill, the future home of Barnsdall Art Park.
Aline Barnsdall envisioned the hillside between Hollywood and Sunset “to be this cultural campus — she wanted artists’ studios, a theater, a gallery,” Lutterodt told me. However, Wright’s focus was elsewhere — he was building Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel at the time — and the project was delegated to assistant Rudolph Schindler and <a href="https://barnsdall.org/hollyhock-house">never completed</a>. The city, too, has struggled with the area, <a href="http://ens.lacity.org/restore/residence_a/restoreresidence_a3524106241_09192016.pdf">pumping in close to $21 million for the historic house and park in a revitalization project that more-or-less concluded in 2015</a>. Rocked by the 1994 Northridge quake, large sections of the Hollyhock House fell into disrepair. In 2014, the Los Feliz Ledger <a href="http://www.losfelizledger.com/article/new-art-installations-at-barnsdall-graffiti-and-homeless/">decried</a> a “surge in trash, homeless encampments, graffiti and vandalism” at the park. It’s also happens to be my favorite overlook in LA — maybe because of its dirty imprecision and seemingly half-finished landscaping, far superior to the Whole Foods-adjacent Silver Lake Reservoir or tourist-flooded Griffith Park.
Despite its long history, the municipal art gallery struggles for definition in the wooly terrain between the commercial art world and more established public museums like LACMA or the Hammer.
Lutterodt, Moloney, and fellow curator Steven Wong recently revamped the mission statement to clarify the gallery’s position within the huge and amorphous Department of Cultural Affairs. Much of the relatively new group at LAMAG drew from the work of late curator Josine Ianco-Starrels, who established the gallery as a juggernaut of young talent in the 1970s and 80s. Ianco-Starrels <a href="https://www.lamag.org/exhibitions/past-exhibit/">put up</a> David Hammons’ first major Los Angeles exposition in 1984 along with Senga Nengudi, Sam Gilliam, and Howardena Pindell. Like the current team, Ianco-Starrels saw the gallery as an accessible cultural locale dedicated to being “responsive to the human experience in Los Angeles,” a phrase front-and-center in the new mission statement. “The human experience in LA is not a monolith,” Lutterodt said. “There are macro and micro communities. What we try to do is create an experience [that] brings all of that to life.”
But non-profit experiences do not have much cache in the LA art world that runs increasingly, as Moloney said, “on the capitalist treadmill.” The gallery does not sell any of the work it exhibits, nor does the work enter a collection held by LAMAG — because there isn’t one. “I always tell people we are unburdened by a collection,” Moloney said. “And they laugh. They say, why is a collection a burden? But we are never duty-bound to previous decision-making.”
With acquisitions and for-profit sales out of the question, the small team at LAMAG focuses on developing accessible programming — there will be a foraging workshop,  and a collage day for COLA — while making room for artists who, as Moloney said, “might be the grandes dames of LA one day.” The gallery’s independence from collectors and “duty-bound” purchases uniquely allows it to focus on the art on view — “to be responsive,” as the mission statement declares, to contemporary art in the city. The gallery’s cottage cheese ceilings and mid-century cement blocks breathe LA: stuck in time, oozing lifestyle, and a curious resistance to the mainstream. I’m not sure what a New York collector would do here. Cry?
<figure id="attachment_11727" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-11727" style="width: 640px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" class="wp-image-11727 size-large" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/colafisher-1024x573.jpeg" alt="" width="640" height="358" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/colafisher-1024x573.jpeg 1024w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/colafisher-300x168.jpeg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/colafisher-768x430.jpeg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/colafisher.jpeg 1500w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-11727" class="wp-caption-text">Image by Jeff McLane. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.</figcaption></figure>
It’s not just the gallery. COLA 2019 seems to lurch with anti-commercial, municipal pride. Kim Fisher’s large-scale collage Los Angeles Hedge (Torn Vermillion, Torn Nickel Yellow, Very Good Genes, Dum-Dums / Fruit Punch, Benedict Canyon) is the central eye candy of the show, where large swaths of distinctly manicured grass fences mingle with newspaper cutouts and a lollipop wrapper. “I was excited to make a piece drawn from my experiences of the city,” said Fisher in our email chain. “It’s about location and [it’s] meant to have a ‘sidewalk nature.’” It looks like a billboard ran into a Sherman Oaks McMansion, a sight not far from Angeleno reality. The works in COLA seem to be surprised by the presence of others, reluctantly negotiating relationships between each other. Enrique Castrejon’s wall-based sculptures draw from his experiences working at an LGBTQ center in LA. Strips of string-like paper printed with purported “facts” about AIDS strap male bodies against the gallery walls, throwing the coolness of text against floating, dismembered figures. Sabrina Gschwandtner is in the next room, where a dense weave 16mm strips culled from Alice Guy-Blaché and Germaine Dulac’s work form the “film quilts” the artist is known for. Texturally and figuratively, they ignite each other: a testament to Moloney’s ability to construct a grant exhibition for eleven artists who decided to, like Fisher noted, “go big or go home.” When I suggested potential themes of the exhibition to Moloney, she laughed. “If I could find one thing that would unify them all, it would be so general as to be redundant.” Unmoored from financial and spatial constraints, the fellowship’s fruitful results seem to explode beyond its borders. Grandes dames, indeed.
<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=-WXuEAwKcSQC&amp;pg=PA35#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false">In a 1916 letter to playwright Mary Ann Hustin</a>, Aline Barnsdall outlined her vision for East Hollywood’s Olive Hill. “California has me by the throat,” she wrote. “There is a largeness of spirit here that will penetrate the souls of the second generation.” Second, third, fourth, fifth — Barnsdall’s dream resulted in the oldest non-profit art exhibition space in the city.
In 2019, on top of Barnsdall’s mount, a stunning Frank Lloyd Wright house meets an art gallery meets a park that doubles as a historic gay cruising site (a topic <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-cola-artist-fellowship-2018502-story.html">examined by the artist Cassils in last year’s show</a>). Fisher’s green hedges seem to blur with the red of the cochineal, which was used by not one but three artists in COLA: Rodriguez, Katie Grinnan, and Alice Könitz all used the insect’s vibrant dye. The colors look like juice boxes, street corners, stoplights. Cohabitation may not be the Angeleno’s natural state — but the artists of COLA 2019 make it look easy, drawing a fierce and uncompromising civic pride to the fore. The exhibition comes at an important turning point for the gallery and the city: in July, the Hollyhock House is up for nomination as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The designation would guarantee the secured protection of Barnsdall’s bequest and undoubtedly draw a larger number of visitors to the park and its accompanying facilities. Cochineal dye, as far as we know, <a href="https://www.visionlearning.com/blog/2015/04/06/bugs-dye-for-colorful-science-history-cochineal/">lasts forever</a> without fading. I can only hope for the same at the Hollywood hilltop.
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The Anti-Monolith: COLA 2019 at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (May 23 – July 14, 2019)

The Anti-Monolith: COLA 2019 at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (May 23 – July 14, 2019)

3-12-ross-acker

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/obituary-spirit-kathy-acker-last-interview/"></div>The October Gallery, London, 1988: Kathy Acker and William S. Burroughs sit across from each other in matching wicker armchairs. Acker feels almost painfully young, sporting a college student’s shaved, bleached head and a cheap-looking velvet shirt. Burroughs is old — his hands shake as the pair discuss his work, his life, and his new paintings on view at the gallery. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp2tsvgclw4">Towards the interview’s close, the pair reaches an impasse</a>:
“To what extent is it possible to save ourselves?” Acker asks. 
Burroughs balks. “Impossible question to answer. What do you mean by us? And what do you mean by ourselves?” 
“Is that an answer?” 
“I feel very little empathy with other people,” says Burroughs. “When you speak of a ‘we’ it would be a pretty small ‘we.’ Most ‘we’s you can excuse me out of.”
Acker is silent. The gravity of his rejection is palpable: Acker wants his &#8220;we&#8221; like a dog and a bone. Her writing is littered with references to Burroughs — most notably in her rampant and controversial use of literary appropriation, a technique that <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/20134512.">almost got her sued by Harold Robbins for her use of his writing in an early work</a>. Through the haze of 1988 videography, the two writers could not seem further apart: Burroughs is blissfully ignorant of the younger writer’s adulation of his work, easily shrugging off her attempts for connection. In death, they are unexpected bedfellows: nine years after Acker’s London interview, in August, Burroughs died. Three months later, so did Acker. The last lines of her <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/03/arts/kathy-acker-novelist-and-performance-artist-53.html">New York Times obituary</a> are in praise of him. Her desire for community among the avant-garde was insatiable during her life and unsatisfied until after her death, when a slew of releases and re-releases gazed anew at the writer’s legacy. Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker, Olivia Laing’s Crudo, and I’m Very Into You: Correspondence 1995-1996, Semiotext(e)’s compendium of emails between Acker and McKenzie Wark, are, respectively, biographical, fictional, and epistolary recapitulations of Acker’s legacy. Acker’s inclusion in Melville House&#8217;s The Last Interview series, where her only female companions are Jane Jacobs, Nora Ephron, and Hannah Arendt, marks her entrance into a broader group of notable feminist artists — a far cry from the niche world that proffered Acker during her lifetime. These new examinations of the author catapult Acker into the mythic canon of admired, dead women.
<a href="https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/kathy-acker-the-last-interview/">Kathy Acker: The Last Interview</a>, from Melville House, is the newest attempt to reconsider Acker’s career after her death. Acker’s contemporary attention has welcomed a new crop of readers to her prolific oeuvre — I am one result, given Blood and Guts in High School by a friend in actual high school, where Acker’s vulgarity and rhythm opened me to a locus of divergent femininity previously obscured by the pop girl-dom(s) of the 2000s. The collection traverses the terrain of the latter section of Acker’s career, after the writer’s rise to underground lit fame with the release of Don Quixote and Great Expectations. The swath of interviews arranged by the book’s editors, Amy Scholder and Douglas A. Martin, is entertaining, poignant, and often troubling, conjuring a surprisingly intimate portrait of the artist that revels in her contradictions. Consistent throughout the collection is Acker’s own personal relationship with her interviewers, including her close friendship with Scholder. Friends, lovers, and Acker(s) fill the pages of The Last Interview, resisting the traditional biographer’s narrative inklings in favor of a glorious polyphony. Here, Acker’s interviews echo her life as they stumble and shout her memory, pausing for moments of pain, pleasure, and humor along the way.
Questions of honesty and authenticity trail Acker’s memory, where the presence of conflicting accounts of and by the writer raise biographical difficulties at the heart of the genre. In an unexpurgated interview between Acker and former lover and Semiotext(e) heavyweight Sylvère Lotringer, the pair discuss readers’ inclination to attribute autobiography to Acker’s first-person narrative fiction. Acker remarks, “I was experimenting about identity in terms of language … I just wanted to figure out how the word ‘I’ worked.” The first person, they agree, provokes an illusion of truth for the reader — an assumption that fascinated Acker throughout her lifetime. As the main character Janey says in Blood and Guts in High School, “You, the thing you called ‘you,’ was a ball turning and turning in the blackness [ … ] every time the ball turns over you feel all your characteristics, your identities, slip around so you go crazy.&#8221; Acker’s relationship to the “I” in her writing, characterized by inconsistency and experimental “slips” of the self, carried over to her own accounts of her life. In After Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus writes, “Acker lied all the time. She was rich, she was poor &#8230; she lied when it was clearly beneficial to her, and she lied even when it was not.” Acker’s changing narrative of her own life story slaps away the grubby hands of the biographer as they snatch, foolishly, at truth. What Kraus emphatically, almost reverentially calls “lies” become, under Acker’s watchful eye, a more fundamental questioning of the stability of identity. The plethora of voices — be they Acker’s personae or her conversational partners — present in The Last Interview offers one interesting injunction into the problem of biography and Kathy Acker, letting the author “[turn] in the blackness” without the interrogation of honesty.
The Last Interview uses Acker’s death as its premise, a conclusion that the chronological collection appears to wander toward almost unwittingly, unchained from the burden of probing narrative investigation. What emerges is what Martin calls “culled highlights,” an attempt to conjure “key moments in her dynamic formulations, the foundations she was always shifting.”
There’s a joy reserved for this kind of obituary spirit — the pleasure of knowing someone, like Acker, who resists summation. Scholder and Martin’s decision to focus primarily on the last decade of Acker’s life brings the writer’s unique relationship to pain, sex, and the body to the glistening fore, suggesting Acker’s death and often eschewing it in the same breath. Moments of tragedy are matched by a guileless humor: in a 1991 interview with Andrea Juno, Acker remarks, “I once had a little cyst in my breast taken out, and I said, ‘Never again! Even if I get cysts in my breasts — I don’t care!’” While Acker may have resisted Scholder and Martin’s decision to order her interviews in such a neatly linear fashion, the premise of the book — a dead author — guides the collection without dominating it, ceding to Acker’s articulations of weightlifting or language, cancer or pop culture.
Acker’s relationship with other people forms the bedrock of the collection, supplanting the stern voice of the posthumous biography with the familiar, informal words exchanged by the author and those who were (are) close to her. In her introduction, Scholder writes, “I realized that what I wanted to remember about Kathy was the conversation … what I like about the interviews is that Kathy isn’t alone.” Indeed, even the interviews feel less like magazine profiles than they do pillow talk. Acker consistently collapses the harsh distance between herself and the interviewer: in one response to Dean Kuipers’s question about taboo in her writing, Acker responds, “Well, you’ve read the book.” Her dismissal of interview conventions reveals the usual invisibility of the structure itself, instead focusing on the intimate connection between two people talking. In Acker’s interview with The Spice Girls — a truly wonderful collision if there ever was one — her persistent first person narration fuels the conversation. She writes, “I like these girls. I like being with them.” The world created by the pop collective fascinates Acker, especially in their relationship to female-fronted community. “Look,” Acker says, “I’m feeling stranger and stranger about these politics based on individualism.” The girls agree. Ginger Spice mentions Freud. I cackle from my chair: Acker believes in girls — so much so that she seems to create them, worlds of them, wherever she goes. In an interview for Artforum, she comments, “My strongest desire … is to make it possible for people like me to be in society.” Acker’s community may be her most consistent truth, revealing a starkly authentic belief in sparking conversation and kinship between women.
The Last Interview confirms Acker’s world of friends, lovers, and collaborators as her afterlife itself, graciously allowing the reader to witness the deep importance of the like-minded in the writer’s life. This may be Acker’s most enduring gift — literary insurrections aside. I am moved now to remember what Kathy Acker has meant to me, how her articulations of blood and sex, pain and strength, gave me a womanhood away from the anemic perma-adolescence favored by the mainstream. Acker’s recent posthumous titles contain an irony only deep, heart-bound friends may understand: that in real community there is no last interview, nor is there really an after. This world, the one full with Acker’s spirit and drive for kinship, is not one that will easily leave the present tense. In death, Scholder and Martin honor the avant-garde female artist by loving her. Acker’s “we” is endless and persuasive — at the end of Burroughs’s life, the pair met at his home in Kansas. His openness and kindness surprised Acker. It doesn’t surprise me: “we” were and are lucky to know her. The noble commitment of Acker’s friends to her enduring memory in The Last Interview is a triumph, breathing new love into her afterlife.
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Obituary Spirit: On Kathy Acker: The Last Interview

Obituary Spirit: On Kathy Acker: The Last Interview

Claudia Ross is a writer from LA. See more at <a href="http://claudiaross.net/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">claudiaross.net</a>.&nbsp;