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.
Melissa Huddleston: Primordial Spring
Luis de Jesus, Los Angeles, CA
June 22 to August 3, 2024
Melissa Huddleston’s gorgeous, uh, swampscapes bring something strong and simple to contemporary art’s recent obsession with interspecies entanglement. Frogs and figures swim and swirl in these large paintings, their silhouettes white areas of absence amidst the marshy fields of marbled acrylic. The compositions do not have discernible centers and, as Joanna Roche writes, “we are not on the edge, but inside.” In narrative, the swamp is generally a place of mystery, a kind of ecological void that teems with life of dubious motivation; it is where witches live. Huddleston’s swamp is celestial, earthly, and Hades-like all at once, striking an uncanny balance between existential dread and the optimism of spring. Wade on in.
Reflection: Where is your nearest swamp?
Five Women Artists in 1970s Los Angeles
as-is Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
June 29 to August 10, 2024
Somewhere along the way, feminist art (and, in many ways, feminism at large) got insidiously tangled up with a perception of humorlessness, as if it weren’t possible to be funny and deadly serious at the same time—humor, after all, is a critical tool of survival. The closeness between laughing and crying runs strong through Five Women Artists in 1970s Los Angeles, curated by Tom Jimmerson and featuring works from Nancy Buchanan, Hildegarde Duane, Susan Mogul, Susan Singer, and Nancy Youdelman, women artists linked by “shared commitments to feminism, photography, storytelling, and the ingenuity necessitated by the indifference that greeted their practices as young women artists in 1970s Los Angeles.” (The L.A. iteration of this show is being concurrently presented in tandem with an exhibition of the same title at Ortuzar Projects in New York.)
Many of the works on view are funny to their core; others simply confront death head-on. Nancy Youdelman, in particular, strings herself taut amidst poles of seriousness and play: in two photographic series from 1974, Running with a tail in Griffith Park and I Dreamed I had a Tail, Youdelman literally realized her dream (like, a sleeping dream) of having a tail by documenting herself wearing a homemade version of the titular appendage. It’s not a cute, diminutive thing either; this tail has power and heft, and the images of Youdelman capture a real feeling of joy and subversive transcendence. Conversely, the artist’s sculptural installation Self-Portrait as Ophelia (1977–2017) is quiet, earthbound, and inherently morbid, a contemplation of social- and self-silencing. This thread of grief and absence is carried in Hildegarde Duane’s series of memorial photographs, My Dead Friends (2024).
Self as subject specifically in relation to beauty standards is also considered with varying degrees of solemnity. Though the text and photographic documentation of several of Nancy Buchanan’s 1970s performances may carry a stoic air, it is hard not to giggle at least a little at Hair Transplant, in which Buchanan ceremoniously shaved a male performer and affixed her own hair to his denuded areas. Susan Singer’s Nose-job (1977) predates Facetune by several decades; this brilliant, silly, and beautifully crafted contraption theoretically allows anyone to “try on” the nose of any number of famous figures by way of a Polaroid camera and spinning wheel. In three digital prints from Susan Mogul’s What becomes a Legend most? series, the artist cheekily centers herself modeling for fictional ads styled after the famous Blackglama mink campaign.
Collectively, these works give insight into important histories of feminist art—not as something bygone, but as an ongoing dialogue speckled with laughter, grief, and plenty of unknown quantities.
Reflection: What is and isn’t funny about how you perform femininity?