Tag Archives: Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles

PHILIP GUSTON — RESILIENCE

RESILIENCE—PHILIP GUSTON IN 1971 is the first local solo exhibition of the artist’s paintings and drawings in over half a century. The show—at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, and curated by his daughter Musa Mayer—is on view for one more week.

The paintings in the exhibition were made in Rome during an extended Italian trip in 1971. Guston had recently weathered a storm of negative reaction to his 1970 show of work at the Marlborough Gallery in New York City.

I’ve found no better word than “resilience” to describe that particular year in my father’s work and life, and indeed to characterize his entire life, especially his early life, when he discovered the great art and artists of the past and quite literally drew and painted a new identity for himself. — Musa Mayer

RESILIENCE—PHILIP GUSTON IN 1971

Through January 5.

Hauser & Wirth

901 East 3rd Street, downtown Los Angeles.

Resilience—Philip Guston in 1971, Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, September 14, 2019––January 5, 2020, paintings, from top: Untitled, 1971, oil on paper; Hand and Stick, 1971, oil on canvas; Untitled, 1971, oil on paper mounted on panel; Untitled (Roma), 1971, oil on paper; Untitled (Roma) , 1971, oil on paper mounted on panel. The Nixon Drawings and the Poor Richard series (all 1971) are pen and India ink on paper. The film still of Guston in his Woodstock, New York, studio, summer 1971, is from footage shot by Michael Blackwood. Images courtesy and © the Estate of Philip Guston, Musa Meyer, Michael Blackwood Productions, and Hauser & Wirth.

CHARLES GAINES — MANIFESTOS 3 IN PERFORMANCE

The whole MANIFESTOS series is created this way: I put manifestos that I come across in a research file. And then I translate the text of each manifesto into musical notation. All the letters of the alphabet from A to G are converted directly into musical notation. So if the letter A pops up, then that’s translated into the note A. I also translate H as B flat, which is part of a Baroque tradition… All of the letters that are not notes becoming resting silent beats…

The whole idea, of course, is that the music is not produced subjectively. It’s produced following the system. The uncanny thing is that sound is subjectively realized. That happens because of the notational system; it’s a diatonic scale. The notational system is intuitive to anybody familiar with Western music… The listener finds the music meaningful regarding content and representation but fully understands there is no intention to produce meaning, or that the music is an expression of the artist… Whoever’s listening is making the meaning, because we’ve been trained to make those links. In other words, our cultural learning is producing our comprehension of the sound. That’s crucial to all my work. I’m arguing that the idea of the subjective imagination is an ideology, it’s not a fact.Charles Gaines*

In conjunction with the exhibition CHARLES GAINES—PALM TREES AND OTHER WORKS, the artist’s MANIFESTOS 3—”a multimedia installation that functions as a systematic transliteration of two revolutionary manifestos into musical notation”—will be performed by pianist Richard Valitutto at Hauser and Wirth in Los Angeles.

An interpretation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 speech at Newcastle University and James Baldwin’s 1957 essay “Princes and Powers”—a report from the famous 1956 Sorbonne conference of black writers—this MANIFESTOS 3 premiere will be followed by a conversation with Gaines and a book signing of the artist’s current exhibition catalog.

MANIFESTOS 3 BY CHARLES GAINES

Tuesday, December 10, at 7:30 pm.

CHARLES GAINES—PALM TREES AND OTHER WORKS

Through January 5.

Hauser and Wirth

901 East 3rd Street, downtown Los Angeles.

*“Manifestos: Charles Gaines in conversation with Cherise Smith, Part 2,” in Charles Gaines: Palm Trees and Other Works (Zürich: Hauser & Wirth, 2019), 118.

From top: Charles Gaines, photograph by Fredrik Nilsen; Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1967 at Newcastle University; James Baldwin; Charles Gaines, Manifestos 3 (detail), 2018, photograph by Nilsen; Richard Valitutto; Numbers and Trees: Palm Canyon, Palm Trees Series 2, Tree #7, Mission (detail), 2019, acrylic sheet, acrylic paint, photograph, two parts, photograph by Nilsen. Images courtesy and © the artists, the photographers, and Hauser & Wirth.


PETER MARK’S HA-M-LET

HA-M-LET—created and performed by Los Angeles-based theater artist Peter Mark—is a “multi-lingual, multimedia performance housed within a projection cube. Sourcing material from Shakespeare’s play, pop internet culture, home videos, and 3D animation, the projected image becomes landscape, body, narrative, and biography—shifting at a rate which pays homage to Hamlet’s own velocity of thought.”*

Presented by CalArts Center for New Performance and Hauser & Wirth, Mark will perform HA-M-LET this week at the gallery’s Arts District location.

HA-M-LET*

Friday, November 8, at 7:30 pm and 9 pm.

Hauser & Wirth

901 East 3rd Street, downtown Los Angeles.

Peter Mark, HA-M-LET, 2019. Images courtesy and © the artist.

CHARLES GAINES IN CONVERSATION

When I went to graduate school in the 1960s… I was faced with a dilemma… I was surrounded by ideas about art that I couldn’t identify with. I couldn’t identify with the practice of trying to decide what to put in a painting using a kind of intuition. Or looking at a painting as a vehicle for self-expression. It’s not that I looked down on that, or that I thought it was such a bad idea. It’s just that I wasn’t working in a manner that required that kind of behavior… Then I ran into a person who told me about a couple of books, which I bought and read. One was by the art historian Henri Focillon [1881–1943], called The Life of Forms in Art [1934]. The other was a big picture book on Tantric Buddhist art by Ajit Mookerjee [1915–1990]. In those books I began to find things that made sense to me in terms of art production.

[Focillon] had a Platonic perspective, that form was synonymous with number, with mathematics, with structure. And he said that form had a life of its own, had its own reciprocal fitness, had its own autonomous exigency..

This sounds like the tenets of high modernism. I don’t think it followed those tenets in talking about some kind of tautology or self-referential or self-reflexive apparatus. I saw it as a general critique of expressionism, which was central to my problem. I didn’t feel connected with the objects I was making, because when I made them, I wasn’t convinced that there was any connection between my motive to make something and the thing that I made. It just seemed arbitrary to me. I would see painters laboring in front of a painting, trying to decide whether a corner should be red or blue. To me it didn’t make any difference. It could be red or blue, you know? How can they feel good about a judgment that they make? On what basis do they establish this connection? And for the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out.

Focillon gave me the idea that you’re ultimately not the author of the object. You’re more like a vehicle of this realization without an author. With Tantric art I saw visual representation of the same idea.Charles Gaines*

This weekend—in conjunction with his Hauser & Wirth exhibition CHARLES GAINES—PALM TREES AND OTHER WORKS—join Gaines in conversation with Thelma Golden, Laura Owens, and Gary Simmons.

ARTIST TALK—CHARLES GAINES IN CONVERSATION with THELMA GOLDEN, LAURA OWENS, and GARY SIMMONS

Sunday, November 3, at 3 pm.

Hauser & Wirth

901 East 3rd Street, downtown Los Angeles.

“Charles Gaines, January 31, 1995,” in ArtCenter Talks: Graduate Seminar, The First Decade 1986–1995, edited by Stan Douglas (New York: David Zwirner Books / Pasadena, CA: ArtCenter Graduate Press, 2016), 172–197.

See Gina Osterloh on Gaines’ Shadows series.

Charles Gaines—Palm Trees and Other Works, Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, September 14, 2019–January 5, 2020, photographs by Fredrik Nilsen. Images courtesy and © the artist, the photographer, and Hauser & Wirth.

FOR JACK WHITTEN

In a tribute to Jack Whitten, a group of his friends and colleagues, artists and curators—including Candida Alvarez, Jose Luis Blondet, Joshua Chambers Letson, Erin Christovale, Harry Dodge, Naima Keith, Diana Nawi, Betye Saar, Gary Simmons, Lily Blue Simmons, Bennett Simpson, and Alphaeus Taylor—will read from NOTES FROM THE WOODSHED, the just-published collection of Whitten’s writing.

 

JACK WHITTEN—NOTES FROM THE WOODSHED Reading and Launch

Saturday, August 25, at 3 pm.

hauserwirth.com/jack-whitten-notes-woodshed

hauserwirth.com/publications/jack-whitten

JACK WHITTEN—SELF PORTRAIT WITH SATELLITES, through September 23.

HAUSER & WIRTH, 901 East 3rd Street, downtown Los Angeles.

hauserwirth.com/jack-whitten-self-portrait-satellites

Above image courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.

Below: Jack Whitten in the early 1970s on the corner of Broadway and Broome Street, New York City. Courtesy the Estate of Jack Whitten.