Report from Vienna: L.A.: the dark side - LAX symposium, exhibiting works by California artists Mike Kelly, Nancy Rubins, Lari Pittman, Paul McCArthy, Raymond Pettibon, Jim Shaw and others, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, Austria

Art in America, March, 1993 by Michael Duncan

Fighting West Coast cliche's, a group of L.A. artists featured in last year's controversial "Helter Skelter" exhibition brought new works to Europe for a show called "LAX."

With the opening up of Eastern Europe, Vienna is at a unique moment in its long and varied history. No longer the end of the road, the Austrian capital has become a jumping-off point for the hordes of Western tourists invading Prague, Budapest and points east. And after decades of languishing in the shadow of Paris and Cologne, Vienna is eagerly waking up to its own renewed importance as an international art center. Sensing the city's affinity with an emerging American scene, the Galerie Krinzinger and the Austrian government this winter hosted "LAX," a two-day symposium on contemporary Los Angeles art, featuring L.A. artists, critics and collectors.

A related group show at Galerie Krinzinger served as a refined and estheticized version of "Helter Skelter" [see A.i.A, Nov. '92], the controversial exhibition organized last year by curator Paul Schimmel at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The MOCA show was instrumental in exposing an emerging group of L.A. artists to international attention; works by Mike Kelley, Nancy Rubins, Lari Pittman, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon and Jim Shaw have since been seen in shows all over Europe. Yet despite its effectiveness as a promotional tool, "Helter Skelter," with its Charles Manson-inspired title and bad-boy stance, epitomized the way that group shows can misleadingly pigeonhole complex work. The exhibition was further burdened by a catalogue that mixed reproductions of the art works with cliche-ridden fiction by writers of the Charles Bukowski school. Happily this smaller show in Vienna was almost entirely devoid of bombastic analysis of "fin de siecle Los Angeles" and offered a European audience a rhetoric-free look at powerful works by eight of L.A.'s most interesting artists. Dislocating - or decontextualizing - the work only made it look stronger.

As Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight pointed out at the "LAX" symposium, since there is as yet no established history of California art, glib critical generalizations embracing Hollywood, Disneyland, the Manson Family and now last year's riots have been all too easy to make. As part of Knight's effort to de-ghettoize L.A. art, he explored the referential complexity of the Heidi installation presented here by Kelley and McCarthy. As Knight pointed out, all of these L.A. artists accumulate materials from diverse sources, piling up diverse and contradictory cultural messages that acquire new meanings as they rub up against each other. Critic and curator Ralph Rugoff also emphasized the range of references, drawn from both art history and the "garbage of everyday life," that these artists use to create impure, fragmented works that cannot easily be tied to any of the usual genres.

A recurring theme of the "LAX" symposium was the influence of Viennese Actionism on this new, "dark" L.A. art. The link with the taboo-toppling '60s performances and socio-religious rituals of Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muhl, Gunter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler is a provocative one. While in Vienna, the American artists made a field trip to Nitsch's dramatic castle at Prinzendorf, the current scene of his elaborate, days-long actions. Several of the L.A. artists have acknowledged Actionism as one of the sources of their work, and McCarthy and Kelley even participated in a 1978 action by Nitsch in California. In an earlier, Nitsch-inspired performance related to his exhibit in the "LAX" show, artist Jeffrey Vallance doused his face in espresso on the steps of the Vatican to create a series of "Veronica's Veil" self-portraits on Itallan silk. The perverse surrealism of Jim Shaw's "Billy" series is in the mode of Gunter Brus's incredible drawings of the '70s, which illustrate Rube Goldbergesque devices for self-mutilation and baby torture. Paul McCarthy's performances - his hilarious and sublime ketchup rites and hot-dog rituals - are uniquely American takes on early filmed actions by Muhl.

Nevertheless, at the symposium Chris Burden pointed out that since he was trained as a Minimalist sculptor, the root of his performance work was very different from the theatricality of Actionism. As attempts to "get to the core of sculpture," his performances of the '70s also placed much less of an emphasis on photographic end results. Ultimately, perhaps the most significant affinity between Vienna and L.A. is in the artists' shared experience of producing work in cultural backwaters; both the Viennese Actionists and the current L.A. artists have had to fight to draw international attention to art based outside the usual power centers. The plus side of underdog status however, is a feeling of community impossible to achieve in New York or Paris. As Lari Pittman put it, this group of L.A. artists is united by their sense of "non-apology."

"Non-apology" certainly defines the stance of Burden, whose unwavering individualism set the tone for the other artists attending the symposium. At the Galerie Krinzinger, Burden offered a sculpture called Another World. Like his hanging sculpture Medusa's Head in "Helter Skelter," the new work is a symbolic depiction of 19th-century technology turned to nightmare. Above a toy-block model of Paris stands a 7-foot Eiffel Tower built from a European version of an Erector set. Attached by chains to its top are two 30-inch models of the Titanic, which a motor sends whirling in a circular orbit around the tower. With a centrifugal lurch, the death ships swerve upward into their dangerous trajectory, the potential for catastrophe evoked with every turn of the camivalesque whirligig. Intricately rendered and beautifully executed, the piece follows in the wake of Burden's The Other Vietnam Memorial, in MOMA's "Dislocations" show [see A. i. A., Jan. '92], to continue the artist's updating of the genre of history sculpture.