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Weekly UpdatesL8S ANG3LES
Annenberg Space for Photography
Los Angeles
March 27-June 20, 2009
The renowned Annenberg Foundation has created a 10,000-square-foot multimedia photography center in Los Angeles, opening with the exhibition "L8S ANG3LES," a group show of ten well-known artist/photographers, photojournalists, and the legendary Conceptual artist John Baldessari. The Annenberg Space for Photography is clearly an intense and sincere effort, inspired by Wallis Annenberg's own love of the medium. It is highly ambitious and a significant investment on the part of the foundation, which has a long history of supporting the visual arts. Unfortunately, the space does not have a curator, and its Century City location, surrounded by glass and steel corporate headquarters and luxury shopping, is about as far removed from the real city of LA as one can imagine.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
For this exhibition, the foundation brought in Anne Wilkes Tucker from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, as a special advisor. Her involvement was apparently to choose which images to exhibit from a pre-selected group of artists. With substantial funding, public support, great artists, photographers, and a curator involved, the opening of the space and exhibition should be something to celebrate. Unfortunately, the exhibition is unfocused, and the venue is problematic.
The participants in "L8S ANG3LES" are John Baldessari, Carolyn Cole, Greg Gorman, Lauren Greenfield, Douglas Kirkland, Catherine Opie, Julius Shulman, and Tim Street-Porter. Beside Cole, three other Los Angeles Times photographers, Lawrence Ho, Genaro Molina, and Kirk McKoy, are also included in the exhibition. The immediate question is what does the work of these eleven very different artist/photographers have to do with each other? If convincingly addressed, the answers would have been compelling. Instead, the exhibition reads as eight separate (6- to 8-image) displays of work with images by the additional three photojournalists scattered around the space. Any possible relationship between the works was ignored and the only connection seems to be that they all work in LA. The official statement about the show reads: "The selected work of the artists, though greatly contrasting in style and tone, all speak to the mission of the Photography Space, which is to celebrate photography as an art form and present images focused on the human condition." Mission statements can be broad in scope but exhibitions must be focused, something obviously missing here, creating the impression that the space is a rudderless, vanity project for the Foundation and its directors.
This lack of focus and purpose is manifest in the exhibition space. Hidden behind a skyscraper, it is difficult to find. Much of the wall space laces large windows, creating glare on the photographs. Another wall is curved, making it difficult to hang. There was a state-of-the-art digital projection area with opposing, high-definition screens, and a booming audio. The loud narration spoke in platitudes about the wonders of LA, the importance of the artist/photographers and the "human condition." It was incredibly distracting and suggested an over-hyped and doomed-to-fail. big-budget movie.
The good news is the fine work exhibited, though most of it is very familiar. Opie's work from her "In and Around Home" series (2005), with a delightful picture of her son Oliver in his pink tutu, is a gem. Greenfield's striking work from "Girl Culture" (2002) is both sympathetic and critical of a privileged class of young women who strike poses that reveal both vanity and self-doubt. Cole is one of the great photojournalists of our time, rushing into scenes of global terror with abandon, and bringing back images that will make you cry. The work of these three artists is well worth seeing and deserves a thoughtful exhibition exploring the personal, the cultural, and the political in photography.
Less interesting is the celebrity portraiture of Gorman and Kirkland, both line photographers whose work uncritically embraces pretense and superficiality. Shulman's photographs of great architecture are important work, but here the overly familiar images and oversized prints look like corporate decoration, and are as lifeless as Century City itself. Street-Porter's photographs are elegant documents LA architecture but lacking in personality to go much beyond that. The other three Los Angeles Times photographers (Ho, Molina, and McKoy) are consummate photojournalists who deserve much better representation than to be scattered around the space. Their exuberant and insightful images collectively fulfilled the premise of the exhibition and show a diverse and intense city, teeming with humanity.
There are two works by Baldessari that have absolutely no relationship to the rest of the show, nor the mission of the exhibition. One is a seminal work, Raised Eyebrows/Furrowed Foreheads: (Blue Eyebrows and Yellow Eyeglasses) (2008), critiquing power and corporate influence, which is a delightful irony in this bland corporate space, and the other is a photo/sculpture/painting, Astronauts and Businessmen (1988), that, without context, makes no sense and lacks intellectual impact.
The exhibition and venue inadvertently confirmed some of the worst stereotypes of LA as being vain, superficial, captivated by celebrity, and without a core. That such a great foundation with such expert advice and support could fail so miserably is a lesson in hubris that should be taken to heart. The foundation must rethink its purpose and most importantly, it must have a curator to drive and focus it, or become just another failed vanity project.
THOMAS MCGOVERN has two books of his photography coming out in 2010, Hard Boys + Bad Girls and Amazing Grace, and is an associate professor of photography a! California State University, San Bernardino.
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