ISSUE 1, FAIR EDITION 16-17 FEBRUARY 2023 The Art Newspaper

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Frieze Los Angeles: 16-17 February 2023

Inside the Hammer Museum’s 24-year transformation A radical renovation and expansion overseen by director Ann Philbin and architect Michael Maltzan is just weeks from completion

ANN PHILBIN AND MICHAEL MALTZAN: MARK HANAUER. BASIL KINKAID: ERIC THAYER

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obody involved uses the word an art museum. We will finally be recognisable “ugly”, but the Hammer Museum as people drive by the corner of Wilshire and before Ann Philbin’s arrival as Westwood, which is one of the busiest intersecdirector in 1999 had some dreadtions in the country.” ful design problems. Despite The makeover has affected every interior being located on the ground level of a Wilshire space as well. “There isn’t a single surface in Boulevard office tower, the museum was largely the museum, not one square inch, that hasn’t invisible from the street, with little signage. The been touched,” says Philbin, who simultanemain entrance was in the parking garage. And ously worked to transform and energise the the interior was clad in pink marble that exhibition programme and collection. “The gave it a corporate 1980s vibe. renovation was led by both aesthetic “People have a hard time concerns and the goal to create remembering what the a more accessible, open and inviting space.” Hammer was like before we The Hammer is not “reostarted, when there was tumpening” per se in March bleweed in the courtyard,” because its makeover says Michael Maltzan, the has occurred over several architect who has worked phases without it ever closely with Philbin for the closing completely to the past two decades to transpublic, except for panform the museum physidemic reasons, as mandated cally and experientially. “The by the state. This example of galleries on the upper floor felt a gradual, iterative remodel distant, and there was no prowas not exactly intentional, says gramming on the ground floor: the Philbin—more a function of not Billy Wilder Theater wasn’t there, the education space wasn’t there, Hammer Museum director having $100m on hand. But it had its benefits, she says. the café wasn’t there. It’s as if you Ann Philbin has worked with were walking into a remote lefto- the architect Michael Maltzan “The process was generative for both of us. We learned as we went ver space in a corporate campus.” for two decades along what the building needed, what the museum required, what audiences Farewell, pink marble wanted. And every time we learned something Now, after a 24-year renovation and expannew, we had the ability to change it.” sion and a $180m capital campaign (of which Maltzan, who built the collector Michael $156m has been raised), the Hammer has Ovitz’s extraordinary home museum as well as announced 26 March as the completion date the striking Sixth Street Bridge in Los Angeles, for its building transformation. Expect to see a says the Hammer process was highly unusual, new Wilshire Boulevard entrance and façade, comparing it to building an airplane while flying plus a new ground-level gallery in a bank next it. In this way it is the opposite of, say, the San door that the museum has leased. And there Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which closed will not be a speck of pink marble left in sight. “Instead of an anonymous-looking office building,” says Philbin, “we will actually look like CONTINUED ON PAGE 4 

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Frieze Los Angeles cleared for takeoff No artist showing at Frieze Los Angeles’s fourth edition has harnessed the fair’s new location at Santa Monica Airport quite as ambitiously as Basil Kincaid, who is sheathing a local pilot’s airplane in his distinctive quilts. Sited near the historic Barker Hangar, not far from the runway, Kincaid’s textile intervention has transformed the aerodynamic vehicle into a powerful sculpture laden with stories. “The quilts surrounding the plane reflect distinct, important swaths of time in my development,” he says. “I wanted to use material from my different growth periods to acknowledge, further invest in

and elevate every stage of the challenging journey that the artist undertakes.” Called Dancing the Wind Walk (2023) after an excerpt from one of Kincaid’s poems, the piece incorporates textiles he gathered in his hometown of St Louis, from thrift stores and in Ghana, where he has recently been based. “The constant in these materials is movement; they’ve all passed hands, and they’ve all had utility,” Kincaid says. “When material purposefully passes hands as such, it gains flight.” Benjamin Sutton

Artist’s stories of migrant farm workers win Frieze Impact Prize THE MIGRANT WORKERS WHO POWER CALIFORNIA’S MIGHTY AGRICULTURAL INDUSTRY are front and centre at Frieze Los Angeles this year thanks to the work of Narsiso Martinez, the Mexico-born, Long Beach-based artist who was awarded this year’s Frieze Impact Prize. The award, which recognises socially engaged work, comes with $25,000 and a solo stand at the fair. Martinez is showcasing works from his Sin Bandana series of portraits rendering migrant agricultural workers on discarded produce boxes. “Drawn from my own experiences as a farmworker, I pay homage to the people who toil in the fields picking the produce we consume,” the artist says. “I portray farmworkers on discarded produce boxes, many times collected from grocery stores. This allows me to reflect upon the disparities of socio-economic lifestyles: that

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of the farmworkers and agribusiness owners.” This is the second year that the Frieze Impact Prize has been awarded; in 2022, the inaugural edition went to the artists Mary Baxter, Maria Gaspar and Dread Scott. This year, the prize is a partnership between Frieze and Define American, a non-profit that supports storytelling around the experiences of immigrants. “Immigrants are not a monolith; their stories are diverse and nuanced,” Define American founder Jose Antonio Vargas said in a statement. “Narsiso Martinez’s portraits of migrant farm workers bring to life complex, compelling and authentic immigrant stories that are often overlooked, yet are part of the American experience.” Concurrently, Martinez’s gallery, Charlie James, is also showing his work at the Felix Art Fair (until 19 February) in Hollywood. B.S.

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NEWS United States

Wheeling and dealing: Los Angeles galleries move into old car showrooms

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t hasn’t been easy for large auto dealers to survive as the industry shifts online, especially in cities like Los Angeles, where commercial real estate is pricey. But where car dealers are packing up shop, art dealers are moving in. Two of the most anticipated new gallery spaces here this season—maybe the busiest yet, thanks to another round of New Yorkers setting down roots on the West Coast—are transformations of historic automobile showrooms. After 15 years in Culver City, Roberts Projects has taken over a 1948 warehouse near the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) at 442 South La Brea Avenue, formerly known as the Max Barish ChryslerPlymouth showroom. There, it has opened its largest and most flexible space yet: 10,000 sq. ft including galleries, offices and a study room.

Gallery co-founder Julie Roberts says they were looking not just for a bigger footprint but the ability to carve out different types of spaces. “Especially with Betye Saar, Kehinde Wiley and Jeffrey Gibson, we do more than exhibiting works: we publish catalogues, do commissions and work on special projects like catalogues raisonnés and archives,” she says. The space opened on 21 January with a solo exhibition of new paintings by Wiley, Colorful Realm (until 8 April). A few miles away in West Hollywood, Hauser & Wirth is opening its second Los Angeles location in a triangular 1931 Spanish Colonial Revival building at 8980 Santa Monica Boulevard that was previously home to Heritage Classics, famous for sourcing rare Mercedes Gullwings and Roadsters. “What looks good in a car showroom looks good in an art gallery, too: the

Roberts Projects opened in a former car showroom with a Kehinde Wiley exhibition higher ceilings, the skylights, the wood truss,” says Hauser partner Stacen Berg.

Rich local history Also at play, she says, was reaching clients “who live on the west side and don’t go downtown that often”, where the gallery’s first Los Angeles space is located. The West Hollywood gallery opened on 15 February with George Condo’s solo show, People are Strange (until 22 April). Hauser & Wirth has had success with its adaptive re-use of a flour mill and bank building downtown, and other galleries also inhabit spaces rich in local history. Jeffrey Deitch’s newest space, previously home to LAXART, was a recording studio for talents like Billie Holiday and Elvis Presley, while UTA Fine Arts’ gallery used to be a diamond-tooling facility. Most recently Lisson, opening in

Santa Monica’s gallery hub bounces back IN THE PAST DECADE BERGAMOT STATION ARTS CENTER and its galleries were threatened with erasure. For years it was the single largest concentration of art galleries in Los Angeles—up to 30 at one point—with its convenient location and reduced rents, due in part to most of the land being owned by the municipality of Santa Monica and also because the project was managed by a partner in one of the galleries, Wayne Blank of Shoshana Wayne. Formerly a train depot, Bergamot was converted into an arts centre in 1994. Two decades later, with the coming of the light-rail train system, the city began fielding proposals from developers for more profitable

Several of Bergamot Station Arts Center’s galleries are opening shows and holding events during Frieze Week

use of the land, while the Metro station cut into a corner of the complex. Several important dealers pulled out: Shoshana Wayne moved to the West Adams area and Track 16 to downtown Los Angeles. Today, only 18 galleries are there but they are on much more secure ground, says William Turner, whose gallery is one of the longest lived. “The city could not have been more supportive in getting us through Covid,” he says, citing both a rent moratorium and rent reductions. Other galleries have moved in— including Marshall Gallery, Galerie XII and Von Lintel Gallery—and some spiffy architecture has been introduced by way of a talent agency

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April, has taken over a gay sex club that closed during the pandemic. It is hard to say if the shift from auto to art dealerships is trend or coincidence. Both Roberts Projects and Hauser & Wirth sound proud of their turbo-charged histories, and subtle touches by their architects, Johnston Marklee and Selldorf Architects, respectively, reflect that. At Hauser & Wirth, expect to see an extra-wide, accordion-style door and big display windows. Roberts Projects has a new roll-up garage door in front and, near the storage at the rear, a richly patinaed bronze door salvaged from the original space. Johnston Marklee has also left traces in the concrete floors marking where hydraulic lifts were once embedded. This is another selling point: these gallery floors can support sculptures as heavy as trucks. Jori Finkel

(Range Media Partners) and a trendy restaurant (Birdie G’s). This week, many of Bergamot Station’s galleries are opening new shows, several focused on photography. Turner will debut a show by Julian Lennon, Atmospheria; Rose Gallery is featuring the Surrealistic work of the Mexican artist Tania Franco Klein; and Berman Art Projects is showing works from a wide range of women photographers including Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange and Graciela Iturbide. Bergamot will be open all day and into the evening on 18 February, with receptions, curatorial walkthroughs and more. On 18 and 19 February, Danziger Gallery is presenting a small fair by the non-profit Photographic Arts Council Los Angeles. Scarlet Cheng

Hayley Barker’s Cyclamen with Postcard from Amy (2022), created during her residency at Laguna Castle THE FIRST SOLO SHOW AT LOS ANGELES’S NIGHT GALLERY by recent signee Hayley Barker, (Laguna Castle, 18 February-18 March), is a test run of a new programme that matches artists with small communities for temporary residencies. Latitude for Art is a non-profit created by the artist Martin Cox and his husband, Thomas DeBoe. The couple has deep roots in Laguna Castle, an ‘intentional’ community of Modernist stucco apartments on Laguna Avenue in Echo Park. Cox became de facto manager of the complex after his close friend Isa-Kae Meksin, who had owned the building since the 1970s, died last June aged 94. Meksin instigated traditions of shared purchases, sliding-scale rental agreements, communal gardening and regular political gatherings. In September, Barker began a residency in Meksin’s apartment, still full of books and art that reflect her devotion to leftist causes. A spiritual interpreter of nature, Barker paints from photos to create mystical translations. “I hope to honour the caretaking that they’ve put into the gardens,” Barker says. “I oftentimes feel like the plants that people tend are portraits of them.” The artist plans to lead a private walkthrough at Night Gallery, where residents will be encouraged to share reflections on the work, which also features scenes beyond the apartment community, from her parents’ home in Oregon. Lyndsay Knecht

KEHINDE WILEY: ROBERT WEDEMEYER. HAYLEY BARKER: PHOTO: NIK MASSEY; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND NIGHT GALLERY, LOS ANGELES. BERGAMOT STATION ARTS CENTER: MEGAN CERMINARO FOR BERGAMOT STATION ARTS CENTER

Roberts Projects and Hauser & Wirth take over two of the city’s historic car showrooms, while Lisson slides into a former sex club

Community spirit is alive in Echo Park

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NEWS Museums “Instead of an anonymous-looking office building, we will actually look like an art museum”

Inside the Hammer Museum’s 24-year transformation  CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 its doors for three years to build a flashy $300m addition. “There are museums that have continued to expand over years, like the Met or MoMA [in New York], but we didn’t until 2020 have the luxury of expanding outward or up,” says Maltzan. “It really challenged us to think in some atypical ways about what role any individual space would play in the museum.” Multi-function spaces became a goal, he says, as “they had to do more than one thing: they had to show art and host dance or have cultural celebrations and kids’ programmes.” (The museum under Philbin typically hosts around 300 public events a year.)

Light and Space gone awry Key moments along the way included constructing the Billy Wilder Theater in 2006, building a bridge spanning the courtyard and connecting the main galleries in 2015, and revamping the Lindbrook Drive entrance and the courtyard restaurant (which became the ever-popular Lulu) in 2019. In time for the unveiling this March, the California artist Rita McBride will take over the new bank building gallery with her Particulates, a sort of Light and Space installation gone awry in that her lasers are designed to expose the dust motes

Key features of the renovation of the Hammer Museum, undertaken by Michael Maltzan Architecture, include a bridge spanning the courtyard, which was completed in 2015, and the 2019 revamp of the courtyard’s restaurant

floating around. It will be visible when walking on Wilshire, as will a new public sculpture terrace in one corner (featuring, initially, Sanford Biggers’s monumental 2021 statue Oracle) and a covered “porch” in another (where a large digital sign board can be used for art or information). The main galleries will have an exhibition of Bridget Riley drawings and the biggest installation yet of the Hammer Museum collection, including little-seen works by Karon Davis, Patssi Valdez and Robert Colescott. Still, there are a couple of odds and ends left architecturally that will extend the project past the 26 March completion date. Maltzan points out that they still need to break through a wall of the bank gallery to create a path and sightline to the Hammer lobby. After that, is he done? “I think that’s up to the Hammer. It’s been such a significant and defining project in my career that it feels strange to say that the project is done,” he says. “For me personally, it’s been an ongoing, deep research project into the role of the museum and that’s been a fantastic thing to be a part of.” Jori Finkel

HAMMER MUSEUM COURTYARD: COURTESY MICHAEL MALTZAN ARCHITECTURE

Ann Philbin, director

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REVIEW Paik the prophet—on screen Director Amanda Kim’s new documentary about the elder sage of video art, Nam June Paik, supplements an endearing chronicle of the artist’s life with archival footage of his pioneering work

The pioneering new media and video artist Nam June Paik is the subject of a documentary that recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah

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am June Paik is often considered the godfather of video. The Koreanborn artist took a medium scorned as the “boob tube” and elevated it, eventually seeing institutions study video as an art form. He was too modest to take the credit, but the evidence was there.     In a documentary that premiered last month at the Sundance Film Festival, Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV, the artist says, coyly as ever: “I use technology in order to hate it properly.” But he also made it acceptable for others not to hate television. Up until his death in 2006, Paik worked to make television a global community, a continual work in progress. He also filled museums with video creations that reflected his own path from Dadaist “terrorist”, as he was called in his early days, to elder sage.   First-time director Amanda Kim layers her affectionate timeline with

archival scenes from the static-filled evolution of a visual medium. It revisits Paik’s journey from Korea to Japan to Germany and finally to the US, and from a life of youthful privilege to one aimed at the killing of sacred cows, and eventually to the refinement of the once-disdained TV. That trip was taken on the internet, which Paik in 1974 called the “electronic superhighway”, coining the term.  Like all machines, the devices he used have been overtaken—by technology, by the marketplace and by users who get younger by the year. Consciously, but mostly unconsciously, later generations are operating in a world that Paik helped bring into being. It is hard to imagine YouTube, the remix or the screensaver without him.   Paik is a natural subject for a documentary, and most of the ground covered in this film should be familiar to those who followed his career. When he arrived in

the US in 1958, the Americans who fought a war that ravaged his country still occupied South Korea. Often the only Asian among his American colleagues, his otherness was magnified by his broken German and English, as we hear in the documentary.

A journey in time and tech

TV-era ziggurat: Paik’s largest video tower, The More The Better (1988), at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwacheon, Korea

Paik was raised under foreign occupation, speaking Japanese. A leftist as a student, he would leave Korea for more than 30 years, making him as much of an exile as he was an immigrant. Politics festered inside of him, surfacing mostly obliquely in his work. He kept critics at bay—when they noticed him—with steely determination under a constant smile.  The documentary follows a straightforward chronology. It cannot help but also be a collage, with footage of Paik’s idol, John Cage, performing in Germany, and pictures of the musically

trained Paik destroying pianos. His explanation was that art was best understood when you took it apart. “BC” was Paik’s term for his life before encountering Cage, who would become a mentor.  We watch Paik construct things like handmade robots in an Arte Povera style. Once he seized on video, his oeuvre is documented on tape, from a cross he built with TV monitors in the crossbeams, to a brassiere of two TV screens attached to the cellist Charlotte Moorman. This collaborator was arrested in 1967, along with Paik, when she performed topless on the street.  The film tracks Paik’s rise to visibility through public television events and gallery shows. “I have to make TV as cheap as a Xerox,” he said, predicting that, in a world where everyone has their own channel, “TV Guide will be as thick as the Manhattan telephone book.” The Portapak, a battery-operated recorder, and the digital synthesiser, developed with Shuya Abe, propelled Paik in that direction.  There were bumps on the way. One was the wildly ambitious live global New Year’s telecast of 1984, Good Morning Mr. Orwell, an unintentional farce filled with glitches, miscues and host George Plimpton drunk on champagne. Paik saw the positive side of creating a TV bomb: millions watched. A stroke in 1996 put the artist in a wheelchair, another machine that needed updating. In his later years, the still-young Paik deepened the Zen-like serenity that was always part of his work. And those images endure. Candle TV, or One Candle, first shown in 1975 and repeated later, was a lit candle inside the empty frame of a television, a reflection on the spiritual in the era of the short attention span. TV Buddha (first made in 1974 and remade for years) placed a seated stone Buddha facing a television showing the figure’s image, a sculptural tape loop.  In Jacob’s Ladder (2000), Paik (with laser specialist Norman Ballard) abandoned the small screen’s scale and created a seven-storey waterfall, with laser projections, in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. No one missed the reference to a final journey upward.    There will be more films on Paik as his vast archive continues to be studied. He knew that he and his creations would be overtaken by new devices, like the iPhone, introduced in 2007, a year after his death. This film helps keep us from losing sight of him and his work in the flood of images that he helped set in motion. David D’Arcy

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Untitled (Woman with Glasses), 2004, acrylic on canvas, 63 × 39" | 160 × 99.1 cm © John Wesley, Courtesy of The John Wesley Foundation

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FEATURE Activist art necessary in their inner workings. In the dayto-day operations of such institutions, those contradictions of “what we want to see in the world” versus “who we are in the world” play out in often subtle—yet insidious—ways, with equity, care, and accountability taking a back seat to financial gain and the maintaining of hierarchical power. MARTHA WILSON: The big difference in my view between art-making in the last 100 years and art-making in the last couple of decades is that artists are now engaged in both the protest and the solution. This may have started during the Aids crisis, when a well-dressed man handcuffed himself to a radiator in the Burroughs Wellcome building. After the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which— to the outrage of legislators and religious leaders—took sexuality to be a legitimate subject of contemporary art, artists started to see surveillance and the police state as a new threat to freedom of expression. In 2004, Franklin Furnace supported an artist duo, Yuri Gitman and Joshua Kinberg, to produce Bikes Against Bush, which marked the convergence of the body and technology. Their Magicbike was a mobile WiFi hotspot that provided free internet access wherever it travelled. A customdesigned printing device mounted on the back of the bike printed spray-chalk text messages from web users onto the surface of the street, overlapping public art with techno-activism by creating a montage of the community wireless movement, bicycle culture, street demonstrations and contemporary art.

Installation view of The Schoolhouse and the Bus: Mobility, Pedagogy and Engagement, part of Pablo Helguera’s public art project, The School of Panamerican Unrest (2006). The installation was shown in 2018 at The 8th Floor, the New York art space established by the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation

can art do now? AUCTIONEERS & APPRAISERS

In interviews published in a new book, Shaun Leonardo, Brett Cook, Martha Wilson and Pablo Helguera consider the contributions that artists can make to social justice in the post-Covid cultural landscape

SINCE 1969

PABLO HELGUERA: PHOTO: JULIA GILLARD; COURTESY OF THE SHELLEY & DONALD RUBIN FOUNDATION

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his discussion reflects on what art can best give to this moment. The artists Shaun Leonardo, Brett Cook, Martha Wilson and Pablo Helguera (the latter of whom is also a regular contributor to The Art Newspaper) question the seismic changes social justice movements in the United States have had on contemporary art. They also grapple with the enduring effects of the Covid19 pandemic on artistic production and display, and on strategies of collective action.

How has social justice changed in relation to art over the last few decades? What is the effect of the cultural sector’s increased interest in social justice? SHAUN LEONARDO: I would argue that there is not an increased desire or an interest among art spaces in engaging with social justice issues, but rather an increased demand that art spaces do so. What artists and administrators, particularly Black and Brown individuals, wish to point out is the inherent hypocrisy of institutions that project, on the surface, democratic values of equal justice and inclusion, yet do not hold these same values as

Art

PABLO HELGUERA: Social justice has now taken the place that social practice had a decade ago. This is forcing arts organisations to grapple with supporting artistic practices that question the very structures of power upon which they are built. BRETT COOK: Earlier in my professional career, social justice almost exclusively meant the integration of new bodies and forms of appearance, without cultural understanding, social responsibility or structural transformation. If art, and art institutions, had images that looked different from the hegemonic norm, or showcased “under-represented” communities, then they believed they were exemplifying social justice. Over the last few decades, popular definitions of social justice and its actions have evolved. Just as “white supremacy” and “defund the police” have moved from progressive margins to popular discourse, social justice in art has moved beyond obscure public panels to primary programming. With the broadening dialogue about social justice, the cultural sector is destined to exemplify this larger cultural literacy. We are emerging into the understanding that social justice means structural change, where art’s action requires more than to look right, but has to “be” right. Seph Rodney wrote about it well in Hyperallergic when he said, “We love representation, the power of signifying, CONTINUED ON PAGE 10 

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Featuring works by Alice Baber, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Hans Burkhardt, Ted Harrison, and more.

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FEATURE  CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9 and the incisiveness of well-argued critique. For us these tools are so robust that we come to imagine they are the demiurges of the world. They are not. And by themselves they won’t effect structural change. Representation alone will not save us.” We are still far from the place where institutions are concerned with being good as much as—if not more than—they and their publicity departments are interested in looking good. However, the challenge of having our actions align with our intentions is not just a challenge for art institutions, but a challenge for us all. To what extent can art spaces and nonprofits nurture artistic practices and operate as sites for organising and activism? MW: In recent years, we have seen artists address stark social realities like police violence against Black and Brown bodies. Shaun’s 2015 Franklin Furnace Fund performance, Assembly Diversion Program, took place in January 2017, when the artist and the organisation Recess launched a nine-month programme in a satellite space at 370 Schermerhorn Street [in Brooklyn, New York]. Diversion programmes present alternatives to incarceration and other adult sanctions for court-involved youth (who are treated as adults by the New York State Criminal Court). Recess partnered with Brooklyn Justice Initiatives to recruit participants at the court level to take part in arts programmes organised by Recess, which were designed and led by Shaun. When participants completed the programme, prosecutors could close and seal their cases. SL: It has always been, and remains, simple: artists need time and space. Alternative and non-profit art spaces can be sites of both

From left: Martha Wilson’s Beauty is in the Eye (2014) and THUMP (2016), part of The 8th Floor’s 2017 exhibition, The Intersectional Self; the show, which also featured artists including Catherine Opie, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Cindy Sherman, explored how ideas of femininity and masculinity have shifted experimentation and care. What does it mean to partner with artists to build a more just and equitable creative community? At Recess, it is in our mission to welcome radical thinkers to imagine networks of community resilience and safety. It is with time for collective imagination, and space for a collective sense of belonging, that we are offered an environment in which we can visualise the necessary steps toward an abolitionist horizon. It is with space that artists can join organising efforts to respond to sociopolitical urgencies. It is with

Andy Warhol, Liz, 1964 © 2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by DACS, London

“We are still far from the place where institutions are concerned with being good as much as they and their publicity departments are interested in looking good” Martha Wilson

time that artists can commit to the longer work of narrative revision to impact culture. PH: The greatest opportunity and challenge for alternative spaces and non-profits is to create new frameworks of support and sustainability, that successfully model the principles and values of artists today. I believe that a business model dependent on tourists, or passive consumers of art, is no longer sustainable in the long term. Museums need to address the challenges they now face regarding the incompatibility of their role as archivists and custodians of art from the past, and their need to be actively engaged in supporting current and new dialogues. Alternative spaces and nonprofits can model new behaviours that larger organisations can learn from. BC: The most inspirational examples of alternate and non-profit spaces support artistic practices that also model social justice in terms of intention and action. The Laundromat Project warms my heart with the way they have opened their leadership structure to integrate artists from their programme history. The nurturing comes through personal relationships and reciprocity, versus a transactional relationship mandated out of the conventions of the non-profit art industrial complex. I am reminded of what [Ford Foundation president] Darren Walker said on 60 Minutes: that philanthropy should not be solely about the donor, but instead how the recipient is scaffolded and how its mission should be focused on justice. I think the most inspirational spaces are trying to live with more responsibility in their ecosystem, addressing the conditions that sustain those relationships over time. • This conversation, held in April 2021, is included in An Incomplete Archive of Activist Art, published by The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and Hirmer Verlag in 2022

MARTHA WILSON: PHOTO: JEAN VONG; COURTESY OF THE SHELLEY & DONALD RUBIN FOUNDATION

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Guimi You

During Art Brussels week in 2022, I visited Magritte's former house at Rue Esseghem 135. I was able to see his bedroom, kitchen and even the workspace where he painted. I was the sole visitor and, upon reaching the backyard, I felt as though I had been personally invited by Magritte himself. This painting captures the view of his house reflected by the windows of the shed at the end of the backyard, which is why it appears left-right inverted. I wanted to create a painting to commemorate my visit, inspired by the impact of Magritte’s work on my art practice.

© Make Room, Los Angeles and Guimi You

Dear Mr. Magritte (2023)

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INTERVIEW Artist

Amir H. Fallah

‘More is more’ The work of Amir H. Fallah, who was born in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution, draws on his migrant experience

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os-Angeles based artist Amir H. Fallah has always taken the “more-is-more” approach to painting. “I really just try to cram everything in there that I can,” he says. It stands to reason, then, that his first institutional solo exhibition in the city, The Fallacy of Borders at the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, feels like a love letter to maximalism itself, a meditation on the electric noise of an increasingly interconnected age. Fallah, who was born in Tehran at the height of the Islamic Revolution, mines the diasporic Iranian American experience through the spirit of remix, drawing on traditions as disparate as 17th-century Flemish still-lifes and graffiti to achieve a vibrant depth of meaning in his work. Fallah’s is not a practice of rote

metaphor; as the title of the show suggests, his art eschews boundaries, material and cultural alike, in service of weirder, wilder ends. “This exhibition spotlights Fallah’s broad visual literacy, experimental drive and creative receptivity—all anchored in his migrant experience,” says curator Amy Landau, the director of interpretation and education at the Fowler Museum. “He narrates from trauma and celebration, as well as his roles as a husband, father and confidant, which lends a deeply humane aspect to his social critique.” Organised around eight different “thematic modes”, The Fallacy of Borders tracks Fallah’s artistic evolution from a teenage zinemaker and publisher of Beautiful/Decay, the magazine and book series highlighting the early 2000s avant-garde, to his career as a multidisciplinary artist and master storyteller. He spoke with The Art Newspaper about his

PORTRAIT: ALAN SHAFFER

The Iranian American artist’s first museum show in Los Angeles takes a maximalist—and archaeological— approach to cultural exchange. By Torey Akers

THEARTNEWSPAPER.COM FRIEZE LOS ANGELES FAIR EDITION 16-17 FEBRUARY 2023

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thoughts on collaboration, misinterpretation and visual archaeology.

THEY WILL SAY A COLLECTION OF UNTRUTHS, COWGIRL: PHOTO: ALAN SHAFFER, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SHULAMIT NAZARIAN, LOS ANGELES

THE ART NEWSPAPER: Can you speak about the way the Beautiful/Decay archive is centred in this exhibition? AMIR H. FALLAH: I was actually surprised that the curator, Amy Landau, wanted to include the Beautiful/Decay archive in the show. I started making this zine not pre-internet but on the internet pre-social media, and sourcing the imagery I would use from graffiti and other subcultures I wanted to explore. She was the one who made the connection between the work I’m making now, like my newer grid paintings, and this project I started all the way back in high school, like the layering of different references and the maximalism. I’ve always thought of myself as a sort of archaeologist, researching and trying to discover new angles. Apparently I’ve been doing this stuff since I was 16! I never really thought about it that way, but seeing it through her eyes helped me really see what all of this has been about since the beginning.

In the tondo painting Cowgirl (2020), Fallah draws on the romanticised vision of the American West that hid the brutal treatment of Indigenous people going to do next. I think it’s also useful to take risks or, if you try something new, to actually risk it being bad or not working. I really have a “more-is-more” approach to my pieces, and including more elements helps a broader range of people navigate the information in the paintings or sculptures or whatever it is they’re looking at.

The show features four stained-glass windows you created with Judson Studios in Los Angeles. How does collaboration fit into your practice? Oh, collaboration is so important, honestly. The most important part about being an artist is being curious, I think, and being willing to try something new. I’ve always been really curious about anything and everything; the fact that I’m doing a show with a museum that has such a large archive meant that I could really get deep into researching and selecting objects that speak to each other. I never want to end up in a situation where I’m just making copies of myself, or a viewer can predict what I’m

“I never want to end up in a situation where I’m just making copies of myself, or a viewer can predict what I’m going to do next”

What do you think is least understood about your work? People sometimes don’t understand that I understand how the work is functioning. They see something they think is too illustrative, or graphic, or too colourful and vibrant, and don’t necessarily get that the maximalism and colour is a seduction, it’s a way of luring viewers into the deeper political messaging of the work. It’s a very intentional aesthetic choice; I want lots of different kinds of viewers to be able to get something out of the paintings, whether it’s cultural hybridity or art history or something more subversive. The techniques I’m using are very much on purpose, and the work has lots of different layers that viewers can interact with. They Will Say a Collection of Untruths (2022) critiques the promise of the co-existence of people from different religious, cultural and religious backgrounds, and warns that despite ideals of peace and harmony, false narratives continue to be constructed on the basis of faith, race and gender

• Amir H. Fallah: The Fallacy of Borders, Fowler Museum, UCLA, until 14 May • Amir H. Fallah: A War on Wars, Shulamit Nazarian, until 25 March

See the critically acclaimed exhibition

at The Broad in Downtown LA. This multi-sensory journey will capture ^TZWNRFLNSFYNTSYMWTZLMIWF\NSLX‫ܪ‬QR sculpture, installation, theater and opera. Come see this extraordinary exhibition before it closes on April 9. Buy tickets now at thebroad.org.

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