Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Christine Miller, Rachel Elizabeth Jones, Sam Hiura, and Nia-Amina Minor pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Maura Brewer: Offshore
March 30 to April 25, 2024
The Canary Test, Los Angeles, California
Negligent, I didn’t have a notebook at the screening and artist’s talk for Maura Brewer’s Offshore, so I ended up scratching notes on my ancient checkbook: “Geneva freeport = Gringott’s / largest art collection in the world,” “primary / secondary market based on asymmetry of information,” and, “resentment / sometimes it seems like the entire art world is run on jealousy anger and shame.”
Offshore is the title of Brewer’s exhibition and its central video work, which she collectively describes in her press release as the culmination of three years of work investigating “how to launder money through art on an international scale.” Though it has journalistic elements, and she speaks to investigative journalist Oliver Bullough who wrote Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World, Brewer’s project is distinctly separate from journalism; instead, at least to this breaking artist’s breaking heart, it reads as a prolonged and personal coming-to-terms with how artmaking is tied to Very Big Money. The film’s tone is matter-of-fact, both informative and intimate, almost like a friendly, stylized YouTube tutorial; Brewer teaches the three stages of money laundering (Placement, Layering, Integration) and travels to the known tax havens of the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, and Hong Kong. She shares that the Ugland House in the Cayman Islands has been, at a single moment, the registered address of 18,857 different corporate entities. She admits to wanting money. In addition to journalist Bullough, she speaks with a CFO, a lawyer, a former art dealer, and an artist in Hong Kong—literally and figuratively, Bullough is the only one who shows his face. Brewer turns an art object into otherwise untraceable money, and she lays out how she does it. She announces her realization that, as an artist, “What I’m doing is making financial instruments.”
At Canary Test, Brewer’s video is projected onto a screen installed as a sort of false wall that spins to reveal the fashion-showroom-cum-gallery’s second chamber, where Brewer has mounted drawings and projections based on her research. These are cartographical and littered with the black rectangles of redaction, souvenirs of her voyages to the mostly invisible worlds of money. Somehow—miraculously?—Brewer has managed to both dissect and reflect on the difficult and perpetually fascinating subject of art and money without pitching over to full nihilism. And it seems to be working for her; Offshore was made possible by a Guggenheim Fellowship and Creative Capital grant. Does it figure?
Reflection: Is your artwork a financial instrument? Explain your thinking.
ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN
April 7 to October 6, 2024
LACMA, Los Angeles, California
Organized in concert with MoMA, Ed Ruscha’s retrospective is a bang-up show, even if it seems a pity they didn’t name it “I Don’t Want No Retrospective.” Presented chronologically, the works on view span from the early 1960s to the present day and are curated such that a remarkable, incisive consistency can be felt across the decades. The words I see most often used to describe Ruscha are “deadpan” and “cool,” and while these are not inaccurate, they gloss over a kind of tenderness that I really think is there. The man, after all, was drawn to sticky substances and comic books, movies and sunsets, the American road—making little jokes all the while. What could be sweeter than a chocolate room? (At LACMA, they have recreated Ruscha’s Chocolate Room presented at the 1970 Venice Biennale, lining a gallery wall with rusty brown sheets of chocolate. An insider showed me where, allegedly, a member of the press who wasn’t me touched the corner of one of the prints. See if you can find the spot.)
Part of Ruscha’s irresistible trick might be braiding together American modernity and quaintness, looking backwards and forwards at the same time. It’s hard not to think about this in terms of Los Angeles, space, and Westward expansion—if Los Angeles represents a sort of future-coded terminus of Manifest Destiny, once you get here, where else is there to look but behind you, into the past? What is the movie industry, if not an elaborate infrastructure for disseminating scenes that have already taken place, of writing and rewriting the past? Speaking of projection, I was delighted to see Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas (1963) and Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (1962) mounted together, underlining the compositional sameness of the projected 20th Century Fox logo and Ruscha’s iconic, oft-revisited Standard Oil gas station. Elsewhere, the hint of the projector’s beam can be found in light falling through a window, film frames frozen in motion by paint on canvas, or a massive triangular canvas mapping the path of “BRAND NEW” to “REALLY OLD”.
Ruscha’s road trip from Oklahoma to Los Angeles is a critical part of his mythology; once he arrived at the Western end-of-the-line, it seems he set himself upon figuring out how to make more, or at least different, space through ingenious manipulations of scale and, significantly, experimentation with the book as a medium. With Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), he creates both a document of Sunset Boulevard at a specific time and compresses a conceptually and physically large geographical location into a book that can fit on a shelf or be stretched the length of a gallery. He spells the word “SPREAD” in tobacco on a massive banner, while nearby the text “America’s Future” is painted in letters barely larger than grains of rice. Ruscha, exhibition text notes, has said that words “live in a world of no size.” With this in mind, it becomes possible to see much of his work as dealing with the quandary of space and place being simultaneously real and not real, of the utmost importance and of no object. His work is more and not more than wonky paintings of weirdly scaled words, both and, now then.
Reflection: What isn’t a landscape?
There In Green California / هناك في كاليفورنيا الخضراء
March 29 to April 19, 2024
Human Resources, Los Angeles, California
“Art will fail to represent,” says Lara Khaldi, the Palestinian-born, Amsterdam-based curator, writer, artist, and educator, in a recent, excellent episode of the Momus podcast. “It is not there to represent. You realize how it fails. You see the abysmal distance between this genocide, this injustice, and what you make as art and as exhibitions.” As artists and art workers grapple with this dissonance in the face of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the ground of the “art world” continues to shift beneath our feet in a shitstorm of open letters, firings, censorship, exhibition cancellations, and the rest of it. The right words are hard to come by, but understanding the shape of the word “complicity” remains an ever-present task.
Human Resources LA was among the early wave of arts organizations who have publicly committed to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) since October 2023, and their current exhibition, There In Green California, expands upon this commitment to liberation in and beyond Palestine. Titled after an excerpt from Palestinian author and politician Ghassan Kanafani’s 1956 Letter from Gaza, the show features seven artists—Ali Eyal, Andre Keichian, Ignacio Perez Meruane, Izdihar Afyouni, Golrokh Nafisi, Hande Sever, and Susu Attar—who, as Gelare Khoshgozaran writes in their exhibition text, “have been making work with the bombs already dropping; already on the run from the kidnappers and their haunting memories; already violated and already under siege; generations displaced and memories already relived through so many stories there is no separating them from fiction.” In keeping with this framing of the historical ongoingness of struggles against colonial violence, Khoshgozaran emphasizes that “here” and “there” are contingent upon, not separate from, one another.
From Ignacio Perez Meruane’s disembodied wax body parts from monuments to colonizers to painted interpretations of horror by Izdihar Afyouni to Golrokh Nafisi’s cheerfully defiant prints declaring “Intifada until empire falls,” There In Green California constitutes an important entry into the urgent material and symbolic efforts to resist genocide and the webs of power—including censorship—that enable colonial violence. As Khaldi told Momus, “The more we show, the more we speak, the truth is said, and we have to keep on saying it—it’s the least we could do in the face of this genocide.”
Reflection: How are you talking about Palestine?