Review of gallery show w/pic
Jorn Barger
...In this light, artists' complaints about celebrity Sunday painters
come off as sour grapes, but this interpretation is unfair both to
working artists, most of whom live for the deep solitude of art making
that is the antithesis of celebrity culture, and to celebrity artists,
who seldom get a fair shake (or any shake at all) from the serious art
press. Three current shows in L.A. represent a cross section of
celebrity artists who, for a variety of reasons, deserve more than our
cursory attention: singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell as the
artist-subject of the second installment of LACE's (Tri)-Annuale;
comedic actor and musician Martin Mull in the backroom at Patricia
Faure; and trumpeter Herb Alpert's solo exhibit, at Molly Barnes
Gallery in Santa Monica.
Of these, Mitchell's work has been the most visible. She attended the
Alberta College of Art and changed her name to avoid being confused
with New York abstractionist Joan Mitchell, but her rapid success on
the folk-music circuit of the mid-'60s pushed her art practice to the
background. She created an outlet for her work, however, starting with
Joni Mitchell, her first album cover: a swirling psychedelic watercolor
surrounding a fish-eye photograph. Through the accomplished
colored-marker-drawings period (like the lovely, economical portrait of
Judy Collins on the inside sleeve of Mitchell's For the Roses); her
period of self-conscious album-cover design, including the hip and
funny landscape photo collages on Hejira and Don Juan's Reckless
Daughter; and my favorite Mitchell, the Malibu snake hunt gracing the
cover of The Hissing of Summer Lawns, she took advantage of the
distribution network of the record industry to piggyback her artwork to
the masses. Through the '80s, as Mitchell withdrew from the public eye,
her vision became more conservative, settling into a very un-courant
mode of expressionist pictorialism, typified by the van Gogh
self-portrait homage of Turbulent Indigo. Her attitude toward the art
world was pithily summarized in a 1993 interview in which she
characterized contemporary painting as "chenille toilet seats with
embroidered bunnies" and admirably advised, "Paint what you like, and
fuck 'em!"
Given this, it's somewhat surprising that Mitchell has allowed herself
to be curated into a space as heavily connotative as Los Angeles
Contemporary Exhibitions, whose baggage includes both its role as the
focal point of much of L.A.'s groundbreaking '80s performance art, as
well as the less welcome burden of its many years as a confused
not-for-profit mediocracy. Added to this is guest curator Amy Adler's
ongoing adolescent fixation with adolescent fixations, resulting in a
show which, in spite of thin press-release avowals to "recontextualize
and bring form to Mitchell's work . . . questioning our understanding
of a very public image when presented a posteriori with the very
private object it mimics," winds up ironically and deceptively
reframing Mitchell's celebrity persona as some sort of amorphous
critique of gender, fame, whatever. The work itself has, in fact,
nothing to do with Mitchell's public image, but is an almost patrician
presentation of her private explorations in oil -- a combination of
affectionate self-portraits and Emily Carr/Group of Seven-derived
landscapes. But, as anyone familiar with her work knows, Mitchell is
one smart cookie and fully capable of making her own decisions about
how her art will be presented. Perhaps funneling her conventional art
objects through established if ill-fitting art-world channels is as
straightforward a take as possible without pulling a Doris Lessing and
putting out work under another name...
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