ALAC | Psychedelics, Butt Funnels, and Cherry Bombs

California is the last stop on the classic American dream highway of freedom. With its 352 days of annual sun and 840 miles of awe-inspiring Pacific coast-line, California is the birth place of LSD, free love and medical marijuana. This is the place where myth counts most. The Golden State, governed by the last of the ageing action heroes of my youth. Where else can one’s ‘grand performances’ of the silver screen be traded straight across for political office? Or where fading stars can chauffeur their maids/mistresses up and down the Strip in solar-powered military-grade SUVs? This is the place where people wait lifetimes for the opportunity to purchase lone bottles of Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon and guzzle gallon jugs of Carlo Rossi. It’s the home of gangster poets and $100 white truffle Mac ‘n’ Cheese. The place where high and low culture get sweaty in the ring together throwing elbow drops from the top rope and bash each other with folding chairs. What more fitting locale could be imagined to host an International Contemporary Art Fair than the mega-metropolis that lies at the beating heart of this over-the -top American end of the road? For myself, a full time artistic entrepreneur and self-proclaimed ‘Rad-Art’ enthusiast, “there’s no place like home”. But since the likelihood of an international art-fair drawing any real attention this far north is (at this stage) highly unlikely. I left town and country behind for one weekend in Vancouver’s older and (much) cooler American stepsister city, Los Angeles.

art fairs are inspiring events for creative souls, and great commercial opportunities for those who make a living off them. The art fair sidesteps the slog of big-box public art institutions bogged down in long-term democratic programming plans. Fairs made up of hundreds of individual private galleries, are able to bring new and unknown voices to the forefront while the work is still hot and fresh. That’s not to say that major galleries don’t make themselves heard in this setting. They do. Pouring in their own dose of heavy hitters, adding weight and punch to the mix. They’re there to remind you that no matter how offbeat or conceptually far-fetched the art they represent may seem, these works command the bucks.

While art fairs are undeniably dollar-driven, there still remains a priceless sense of bravado. A sense that despite the omnipresent apparition of a dollar sign floating above the gallery walls and lurking behind canvases, the true capital lies elsewhere. The unspoken priority of each individual gallery is to one-up the adjoining white cube in an earnest battle of visual/conceptual radicalism, to be the star of stars. This rivalry keeps the Contemporary Art Fair in a colorful state of progressive forward motion not often found outside the fair grounds. It is this dynamic environment that in turn shapes the consumer’s perspective and defines what is “IT” and worthy of collection.

On the last weekend of January 2013, the Art Lost Angeles Contemporary (ALAC) International Art Fair, was held in an abandoned airplane hangar in Santa Monica. The Barker Hangar is a 35,000-square-foot former airplane parking garage that according to its website, “plays host to some of the most exclusive events in Southern California.” The private airfield is located only about 12 blocks from the bittersweet aroma and flare of Venice Beach. For the event, the hangar itself was temporarily subdivided into 61 smaller galleries with impeccable white walls, all neatly nestled beneath the canopy of the hangar’s lofty expanse.

Though the fair was far from quaint, it had nothing on the mega-fairs like Art Basel and Frieze. Thus ALAC slots neatly into the “completely manageable” category. My wife and I were able to comfortably meander the galleries and adjoining lanes of the fair, letting all that the ALAC had to offer seep in over the course of two days. Not to say that any number of the particular works we encountered didn’t merit hours of individual contemplation, as many did. Rather, the way your mind operates in an art fair is completely different than it does in a singular gallery space. It’s like wandering into a spice market in Southeast Asia. You are confronted by a labyrinthine network of stalls and alleys, where each turn presents a new smell, colour or sound and draws you deeper into the maze. It’s like binge eating at a mind-melting smorgasbord of sensory indulgences. And yet, some lingered; some works pushed themselves through the pile of paint and sculpture to the forefront of our shared memory.

From Paris, Galerie Claudine Papillon brought the work of German-born artist Luka Fineisen, which Claudine describes as exploring “sub atomics, quantum physics, and the moments of becoming.” A piece titled, Many Particle System (2012), consisted of a Plexiglas box (measuring 80cm by 50cm by 45cm) containing two opposing black fans (the same ones found behind the thick glass of sweaty summertime bus station ticket booths) and a few liters of gold polyester glitter. The small fans slowly oscillated night and day, arguing over which corner the gold glitter should be piled into; resulting in a unrelenting snow globe of gold dust. On closer investigation, existential visions of ‘Science’ and its current faith, ‘Quantum Mechanics’ were themes found to underpin this and many other works throughout the fair.

Two of the artists represented by Quint Contemporary Gallery also held scientific philosophies at the heart of their own creative super novas. Adam Belt’s, Through The Looking Glass, used a very finite space to create an illusion of the infinite. A doughnut-shaped window 5-feet in diameter and 3 inches deep installed into the gallery wall used opposing two-way mirrors to create a sort of worm hole in the universe that is the modern gallery, an infinite view into nothing, reflected infinitely.

The other of Quint’s artists, Kelsey Brookes a ‘bio -chemist turned bohemian-surfer’ took inspirational cues from the molecular structure of mind-altering drugs such as LSD and MDMA for his intensely colorful, pseudo-psychedelic compositions. By illustrating the subatomic spaces between atoms, Brookes revealed the quantum potential of the micro universe on that of the macro, in both physical and psychic terms.

The surreal works of heavyweight old-schooler Richard Jackson, a 74-year-old Californian native and contemporary sculptor represented by the David Kordansky Gallery, were equally psychedelic in imaginative scope. Jackson has produced a massive body of work in his long career and the pieces displayed this year at ALAC were indicative of his classic style. In easily one of the largest ALAC’s galleries Jackson placed atop a circular mirror plinth, a life-sized bronze cast of black bear stood on its head. Into the up turned ass of the bear, a polished stainless steel funnel has been inserted while simultaneously an 18-inch flexy tube protruded and hung in an earthward arch from its crotch. A large metallic bottle has been placed into the funnel and the piece is titled Bear Bong. Another of Jackson’s works titled Self Portrait consists of a massive bronzed head, perhaps five foot tall dropped upside down on an over-sized wood jigsaw puzzle in the shape of a painter’s pallet. Placed on to the inverted bust is a large metal box, powder coated in an explosive note of yellow. Heavy enamel paints in bright red and deep blue, have been poured into the box. These paints, after having seeped down through the hollow center of the semi-collapsing head, spill out through the cracks to partially cover the painter’s pallet with a colorful menagerie of viscous brain matter. Among other equally elaborate works on display in Jackson’s exhibition was a small flashing neon sign that ironically read, “less is more”.

The works of Vincent Szarek, exhibited by Ace Gallery, showed the same level of craftsmanship as Jackson’s work, though the artist expressed himself through slightly more subtle means. Black Cherries (2013), consisted solely of an engorged pair of cast aluminum cherries that recalled the glossy iconography of 50’s commercial art. The impressive scale and high-gloss flesh of the cherries demanded the attention of all who passed by, including Steve Martin (Steve Fucking Martin!) and that dude from all the Wes Anderson flicks – you know the one – the one who played Max in Rushmore, and then that same character in every other movie. Martin and that other guy, like everyone who walked by this piece, seemed transfixed by the funhouse mirror effect of the big black berries hanging like testicles by meter-long gold-plated stems.

From my conversations with Ace Gallery’s Director Jennifer Kellen, I learned that cast aluminum, high gloss enamel, and gold plating are commonly used throughout Szarek’s work. Kellen also showed us images of an impressive exhibition currently being installed at Ace’s home gallery. The photos detailed a 6-foot long heavy bag hung from chains. Unlike the bags found in inner-city boxing clubs, this was suspended from opulent links of gold chain and the metal cast bag itself was coated in a glossy black enamel finish. Composed of these lavish materials, the repurposed sports equipment chuffed off its utilitarian reality and donned the magnificent aura of some religious artifact found in center of a 16thcentury Roman cathedral. Szarek’s up-and-coming exhibition also included an impressive full scale operational baroque horse carriage in un-finished cast aluminum, encircled by a series of 6 foot tall upturned red plastic cups. The same sort of cups that are so commonly used to serve up foamy flat beer at hockey games and monster truck rallies.

From the moment we entered the Santa Monica Airfield and began negotiating our way through the installation of towering cigarette figures brandishing signs with slogans ripped from the mouth of FUBAR’s Deaner, we knew commercial art in LA was somehow different. It has gone over the proverbial edge, but like a Looney Toons character, it hasn’t yet noticed the loss of solid ground and just keeps right on running. Whether or not this fast moving ‘Swiss-Army-Knife’ style of contemporary art will ever look down or just continue running is anyone’s guess. But, as long as there are cheap flights and star filled nights on the Venice boardwalk, and as long they celebrate videos of a nude man with the rising sun shining out of his ass as high art, we will continue to make our pilgrimage to the end of the road.