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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/arts-culture/art/mean-los-angeles-frieze-art-fair-comes-town/"></div>Los Angeles has long played the role of the odd cousin to the established art world. Too Hollywood, too young, no collectors, too spread out: all of these detrimental to a city that, ironically, has been where people from all over the world come to make their creative dreams come true. But February 14–17, the London-based Frieze Art Fair hosted its inaugural Frieze Los Angeles at Paramount Studios hoping to achieve what other art international fairs in Los Angeles have failed to do: stick around.
Los Angeles has long been a draw to countless creatives and artists, but it has a history of not being taken seriously as a major player in the institutional art world. There is a myth that Los Angeles is a city where art is made, then it is consumed in New York. But there has always been a strong art scene — it’s just a different perspective than other major art cities. Institutions like LACMA and MOCA have understood this innate fact, especially in recent years. Los Angeles is a different audience, showcased in 2011 during the great art narrative that was <a href="http://www.pacificstandardtime.org/index.html">Pacific Standard Time</a>, a collaborative collection of exhibitions for Southern California artists put together by the Getty Foundation. Since then, it seems as though Los Angeles is happy to celebrate and re-contextualize its long-standing art scene. But it’s the city’s overwhelming tie to the film industry that has long meant the art establishment doesn’t take it seriously. It’s important to note, too, that one of the owners of Frieze is Ari Emmanuel, the co-CEO of WME, one the largest talent agencies in Hollywood. Is the man who inspired Ari Gold one of the driving forces to shift years of art world bias? The simple answer is: yes.
When viewed through this historical context, the most intriguing thing about the Fair is its location at Paramount Studios. As long as there have been moving pictures, there has been an art salon to look down on them. It’s low art — pop — whereas the institution is high, real art; it’s the number one classic narrative of cultural capital! Frieze really sees the irony and the conversation this location inherently creates: Hollywood and its history; Hollywood as a form of visual culture; site-specific works engaging with the fantasy of the location; the New York backlot being taken over by the art community; and, most ironically, the fact that the Los Angeles art fair is on Paramount Studios&#8217; New York City backlot.
To a point though, this perspective and narrative is reductive. It discounts the fact that artists and galleries outside of the entertainment industry are very much part of the fabric of the city. So, why has no major international art fair had staying power? According to <a href="https://news.artnet.com/opinion/frieze-los-angeles-1215848">some art world experts</a>, it’s because art fairs exist to sell art. And Los Angeles’s real problem with penetrating the old guard is that there are no real high-profile collectors to make the art fair system viable.
So why now? Why is Frieze giving it a go? In recent years, Los Angeles’s contemporary art world has been growing in terms of notable institutions and galleries, like international arrivals Sprüth Magers and Hauser &amp; Wirth, and the opening of The Broad and the Marciano Art Foundation.
“Los Angeles has been on the up-and-up of the arts scene for quite some time,” explained local art professional Roxie Sarhangi. “The inaugural edition of Frieze in Los Angeles offered the city a wonderful international moment. It was a sold-out event which shows how significant it was timing wise. The fair only continued the narrative of Los Angeles as a key cultural and art city.”
Frieze has come now because they believe Los Angeles can attract people to the fair in a holistic sense: local and beyond.
“The quality of curators and collectors walking through was impressive,” described Kevin Scholl, director of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. “And every client I spoke to was impressed by the art presented.”
Walking around the Fair, there was a peculiar dichotomy. Upon entering the gallery space, it felt as though I could have been standing in any art fair around the world: there was a good showing of international contemporary art, with many of the big players like Gagosian and the White Cube centered in the space. Navigating the area, I asked a number of gallerists if the Fair’s location in Los Angeles influenced what they brought. The answer was always no. The fact that it felt like any other fair inside the gallery space was generally seen as a positive. Why shouldn’t Frieze Los Angeles feel the same as London’s or New York’s? The perspective was overwhelmingly that Los Angeles shouldn’t be different. With this approach, the Fair seems like just another outpost of the international arts community.
There were also 10 “young” LA galleries — 10 years or younger — on either side of the space. These galleries were one hint of difference, though you might not have known at first glance. This community connection offered a chance for local galleries to craft new relationships with the international community descending on the city. One of these featured galleries was The Pit.
“I think it’s a good thing for galleries that will be introduced to a wider group of collectors from other parts of the world,” explained Adam Miller, owner and director of the Glendale-based gallery. “I think Frieze’s success will probably mean that more smaller art fairs will come to Los Angeles. I hope in turn it will help the overall economy for galleries in Los Angeles as more fairs and collectors come here. Hopefully that will mean more galleries will open up and the scene will continue to expand.”
For Miller, the fair was a success to participate in, and he believes the Fair “has shifted the way that the people are viewing the business side of the LA art world. Meaning, I think LA artists have been on the map and talked about on an international level for many years, but outside collectors often only visited a small number of galleries when they would come to Los Angeles. I think that Frieze has done a great job of introducing new galleries and encouraging visitors to get out to other parts of Los Angeles to visit spaces that they haven’t in the past, and in turn create new relationships.”
But it was engineered not only to attract collectors: the organizers dove into this endeavor with every intention of creating an artistic celebration.
Outside the gallery space, and well into the Paramount backlot, the Fair became a mix of installation, performance, and site-specific works all tied together through the façade of cinema. New York-style storefronts and brownstones became spaces for art and branded bars and restaurants. MLK High School offered itself as a space for Karon Davis’ installation “Game.” An entire building was taken over by a neon green a serpentine creature in Trulee Hall’s “Infestation.” At one point, I walked into an empty, unfinished room to find a performance that involved two art sellers improvising a work together on behalf of their artist, staring right at the audience, daring them to engage and question. A giant ketchup bottle by Paul McCarthy towered as high as the buildings. It was surreal, and, well … fair-like in the truest sense of the word. Elsewhere on the lot were conversations on patronage and talks between artists, as well as a series of films. Off-site and across the city, music performances and other public programming events were held, all seemingly centralized around the Paramount location. The Frieze projects and programming created a sense of playfulness that was also engulfing, driving conversations about fabricated reality, site-specific art, urban exploration, and cinema. It was trendy on the surface, but on deeper introspection, forced one to think about space — how art engages and has the power to affect it.
Now, Frieze has come and gone. There’s been a return to normalcy in the city: a quick transition to preparing for the Oscars, and then reeling from their fallout. But one particular talk hosted at Frieze brought up the real battle for Los Angeles. Rafa Esparsa and Ron Athey — Southern Californian performance artists whose works represent their queer identity and their relationship to the world around them — discussed how they approach their work. At the end of the conversation, someone asked about cost of living. The mood turned dour. High living costs, they explained, expose a problem that not only affects the art world but also Los Angeles at large. Artists have always been making art here, but with housing becoming increasingly less affordable, how can LA artists — and the world around them — thrive?
Frieze’s success stems from the fact that it gave into the spectacle of Los Angeles, creating a time and space for programming across the creative spectrum that was uniquely Los Angeles. Frieze proved that in this city a fair can’t simply sell art. It needs to engage the public through multiple channels.
“You could feel the excitement from collectors, curators, and dealers,” explained Kevin Scholl. “Rain didn’t stop anyone from showing up on opening day, and that level of energy carried through the weekend!” He went on to explain that the event “further solidifies Los Angeles as a fine arts destination.”
In the end, Frieze Los Angeles proved that maybe — just maybe — the international arts community has finally accepted Los Angeles for its differences and acknowledged its similarities.
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What Does it Mean for Los Angeles When the Frieze Art Fair Comes to Town?

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/art-becomes-catharsis-en-masse-space-advocartsy/"></div>On a block of downtown Los Angeles in what would appear to be an art world no-man’s-land, there lies a hidden treasure. Recently opened, THE SPACE by <a href="http://advocartsy.com/currentexhibition/">ADVOCARTSY</a> brings a cultural perspective to contemporary art that is rarely found in the international art world.
Showcasing exclusively Iranian artists and artists of Iranian descent, the gallery is one part international artist showcase and one part advocacy space for the community. It displays art unique to the Iranian experience, and offers a space for artists to share their work with a public that expands beyond L.A.&#8217;s Iranian population.
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THE SPACE is more than just another white wall gallery; there is power in the way THE SPACE not only appreciates these artists’ work, but also fosters their creativity, in part through outreach. It aspires to connect those who are Iranian with those who are not, to allow for greater engagement with the visual, sonic, and emotional components of Iranian culture.
Founder of THE SPACE by ADVOCARTSY Roshi Rahnama previously worked as a lawyer with a strong interest in finding ways to support her community through her work. But what drove her to find a brick and mortar space for ADVOCARTSY, an arts organization focused on supporting artists of Middle Eastern descent, into a full-time gallery in downtown L.A?
“Los Angeles is home to the largest community of Iranians outside of Iran,” Rahnama told me with great passion at THE SPACE’s latest opening, Pouya Afshar’s solo show En Masse. “But in my awareness of the vast body of Iranian contemporary art, I felt there was a void between the two worlds of the community: the art that is produced by the Iranian contemporary artists and the contemporary art world in Los Angeles. It was time for someone to step into it to fill that void, so I stepped in to do that with this platform. We’re so happy to have a fixed location where we can keep the energy going with a variety of shows to bring awareness of the Iranian contemporary art world to the community of Los Angeles.”
The gallery’s stated mission is to show contemporary Iranian artwork, which is loosely defined. The work that has been and will be on display is so varied and unique to each artist’s experience, style and point of view that it begs the question: what even is Iranian contemporary art? What does it mean to be an Iranian artist living abroad? How does one navigate the cross-section of cultures?
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Afshar’s En Masse, on display until Sunday January 28th, is an exhibition that deals explicitly with grief. “After my mentor [CalArts Character Animation professor Leo Hobaica] passed away, I needed to mourn,” Afshar described matter-of-factly.
From the collection of works in the gallery, visitors immediately understand that this group of paintings, drawings, video animations, and mixed media pieces were his catharsis. It was a word he used a lot when I spoke with him, and it’s incredibly powerful to witness these pieces with this in mind. Describing all of his pieces as improvisations — they can be viewed as cathartic exercises — symbols that hold power in his narrative appear over and over and over again.
His use of repetition is powerful — the duality of mirroring figures on a canvas; the dual fetus’ representing Hobaica, who was himself the older brother of a pair of twins; diptychs and triptychs of faces; noses circling around the face like a whirlwind; a movement becoming lost and changing upon each brush stroke or pastel swipe, or in the repeated, slightly changing loops of a video installation. It’s all a meditation on the idea of memory and loss, and how every time a memory of a person who has passed appears in one’s mind, it changes. There is no single feature of these memories, but rather a constantly morphing, fluid element that is intangible but somehow feels tangible. Every piece plays with a fluid texture, from works on wood that used the natural grain and impurities as a paint to the way that, depending on how you view one of the two mobiles on display, you’d either see a figure or a collection of floating things.
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Afshar turned this incredibly universal experience of loss and memory into a cross-cultural examination of human mourning rituals. Throughout the exhibition, the figure — who is the representation of his mentor — is depicted in a helmet with feathers attached. This symbol is from a shi’ite Muslim tradition in Iran called Ta&#8217;zieh, a ritual that reenacts the death of Hussein, the prophet Muhammad&#8217;s grandson. It is a community performance (also known as Persian Theater), similar to the Christian tradition of the passion play, where members of the community gather and watch (most of the time amateur) performers recount the tragic death of Hussein, symbolizing epic spirit and resistance. But one might also view this as a condolence play, a symbol of mourning and finding peace by turning a tragedy into art.
“When I was a kid I used to go to these passion plays and I couldn’t understand why people are so engaged with this,” he said describing his engagement with the plays. “It’s a story about some religious figure who’s dead and you guys have heard the stories. Then I realized that it’s about them. it’s about themselves, releasing some of that energy, so it had some kind of cathartic approach to it.”
The helmet references costumes and outfits Afshar witnessed during these performances growing up in Iran. Throughout his exhibit, he presents his mentor in the headpiece of a fallen leader, creating his own form of symbolic catharsis.
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One of the most notable aspects of the exhibition is the mash-up of Ave Maria and Iranian percussion, performed in the South Iranian tradition, representing Hussein, like the aforementioned passion play. Both ritual songs hold different meanings for Afshar, who is interested in using sonic elements in exhibitions. One interpretation is that this is a dialogue: a cross-cultural examination of ritual and musical influences intertwining together, creating a reflection of two worlds that aren&#8217;t so different. And though this is indeed one reading, the story behind it adds a layer of warmth and affection to the artist.
“My mentor was a very interesting character and artist. He was into flash mobs. At the memorial at the university, some of his students managed to have Ave Maria sung by a flash mob. This kind of mixed up with the sound that I had in my head with the ritual.”
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THE SPACE allows for this engagement with loss and how we process it as human beings, and showed this in three distinct ways: culturally, environmentally and privately. The exhibition portrays the way that communities and cultures interact with grief, but also how they intersect, especially when one is in a country where the predominant culture is not their own. In Afshar’s case, he questions the very nature of his own memory and has created works that reflect on and honor his teacher.
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When Art Becomes Catharsis: En Masse at THE SPACE by ADVOCARTSY

Melissa Karlin is a writer and well-rounded creative for hire from the wild northern suburbs of Los Angeles. She is a cultural carnivore who is constantly on the hunt for creative engagement in her home city and around the world. Follow her @meli64 on Twitter and @melissa.karlin on Instagram, and check out her website&nbsp;<a href="http://www.melissakarlin.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-auth="NotApplicable">www.melissakarlin.com</a>.