Tenth Reunion - Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition - Interview

ArtForum, Feb, 2001 by Jan Tumlir

JT: How do these ideas about globalization and travel and exposure to more and more information square with the notion of "staying put" after art school that I think both of you were stressing?

HS: One of the things that the metaphor of the breakthrough allows for is a kind of doubly articulated work. What I find really attractive about, say, Sarah Lucas's work is how British it seems, because the kinds of cliches she draws on are quite specific and local, even though where she plies them, if you will, is within an international or a cosmopolitan art world. The same is true with Murakami's interest in manga and anime. Indeed, one of the ways popular culture gets taken up in this work is in the particular, even as the work itself becomes situated within the cosmopolitanized, globalized art world. As Lane Relyea says in his essay, to have called someone like Jay McCafferty an LA artist in 1976 is very different from calling Jason Rhoades an LA artist in 1992. In the mid-'70s, the term had a peculiar content to it that also kept it provincial, I would say, rather than local. Whereas for Rhoades, it's both a kind of address and a link to a particular set of friends, a community, and an art world.

JT: Even in relation to a show like, again, "Helter Skelter," you could bring up that theory of sweet neglect to explain some of that work. There was no existing Infrastructure to accommodate an emergent artist generation. There were no venues for this type of work, so artists were left to pursue their own idiosyncratic interests, and from that, there might develop a kind of vernacular or regional style. But today it's almost impossible, I think, to talk in these terms.

PS: The phrase "sweet neglect" is something Lari Pittman has used on a regular basis, and I rather agree that the situations that existed in the late '70s and early '80s that shaped his formative work are very different from those faced by the generation of Sharon Lockhart and Jason Rhoades. Locally, if there's any sort of sweet neglect, it's the sweet neglect of these artists toward the LA art scene that nurtured them, and in fact, most of them are more than happy to stick up their middle finger and walk away from it all, whereas for someone like Lari, being accepted here is still of vital importance.

HS: When I go out to LA now I don't see it as being neglected at all. In fact, when I go to New York what I see is art from LA and London. So, like Paul was saying, that space is not available currently in Los Angeles, the space of being left alone. Now, having said that, one curiously precarious phenomenon that I've begun to notice and talk to younger artists about in Los Angeles is what it means to have a gallery in LA, a gallery in Berlin, and a gallery in New York and still be $75,000 in debt from student loans--art-school tuitions and their financing are the same as those of law or medical school. It's professional training. It's a very curious twist on the avarice of artists and the market.