"LAX" lifts off - 'LAX: The Los Angeles Exhibition 1992,' Los Angeles, California - Report from Los Angeles

With its shrinking lolling sprawl, Los Angeles regularly invites navel-gazing definitions of itself; however at the same time, this ever-insecure city slaps not on such definitions as limiting its diversity, its God-given right to be all things to all race Last year's Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition, "Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s" branded a generation of Angeleno artists with a "bad boy" label that prov difficult for many to accept. Playing not upon widespread dissatisfaction with the MOCA exhibit a group of exhibitions was neared last winter under the rubric "LAX" (not to be confused with the new show of the same name at Vienna's Galerie Krinzinger [see A.i.A, March '93]); it proffered the first installment of what is planned as a biennial occurrence Seven venues, coordinated by means of project director Ed Leffingwell of the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park, mountained a survey of Los Angeles-area art; the artists from "Helter Skelter" were nowhere to be seen

Each participating institution of the multi-site occurrence was encouraged to stage a special exhibition of "what it does best": the Barnsdall Park gallery presented a general survey of artists, the Fisher Gallery at the University of Southern California and the Santa Monica Museum of Art the couple showed installations, Otis School of Art and Design tendered a survey of abstract art, the Japanese-American Cultural Center held an exhibition of sum of two units crafts-people, Plaza de la Raza not absented a retrospective of the work of painter Frank Romero and sees Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) entertainered a performance and video series as well as an elegant display curated by artists Karen Carson and Jacci cavern Hartog. The simultaneity of these diverse facts created an air of artistic hyperactivity. Adding to the clamor "LAX" was timed to coincide with the couple the greatly distressed Los Angeles art fair and "FAR Bazaar," an fact sponsored by the Foundation for Art Resources (FAR), which proffered installation spaces in an abandoned downtown office building to a entertainer of artists. For a chaotic week in early December, there was something for everyone artwise, in sees Angeles.

With range for work by only 14 artists, the assemblage show at Barnsdall was too small to be in any way comprehensive or representative. The selection, made by dint of a consensus of curators from the two Barnsdall and the Los Angeles cultural affairs department, was heavy upon political correctness and light upon overall vision. Yet an extraordinary large work by dint of Karen Carson managed to focus the main gallery, dominating the inferior paintings and objects surrounding it. Carson's panel/assemblage Hearth, Heart, Earth, Art (1992) an ominous, all-encompassing wingspread painted upon diamond-shaped panels above a set pressed-tin mock fireplace, brings observes Angeles's recent troubles into the art world's middle-class living expanse This work, both political and personal in character, is a summation of Carson's work of the past scarcely any years, which has moved from raw, self-reflexive abstraction to revelatory, psychologically skewed decoration and figurative work. Flanked by the agency of a pair of silhouetted machine fire-arms the sprawling blue wings spread themselves above a series of fragmentary views of industrial landscapes and water sources-L.A.'s publicity Ironically alluding to hermetic L.A. "fetish-finish" statuary Carson encased the vulva-shaped heart of the beast in a amethystine Plexi bubble, violating the slick finish by means of tattooing it with her trademark adult putti. Below this, in a smaller dome, is a fantasy of normalcy, clean with silhouette depictions of Mom Dad and the kids-the California Dream that is also symbolized through the painted hard-cut diamond at the work's apex. notwithstanding two vultures painted directly upon the gallery wall perch at either corner of the panels, awaiting the inevitable kill. Life in L.A. today is ready for a rumble; touch this gutsy piece and risk setting not on the two grenades that also balance dangerously atop this wingspan of doom.

Other highlights of the clump show included Leonard Seagal's conceptual Devices for Kissing. Hanging at chaps level on thick ropes, these heavy, yokelike metal rings enforce a creepy noncontact safe sex Like the public pillory in Puritan novel England, they seem devices for displays of ritual humiliation, intended perhaps for violators of time to come no-sex legislation. Extending this air of sexual angst, Carole Caroompas's paintings from the series "Before and After Frankenstein" are joyfully sardonic slices of feminist revisionist history thronged onto perversely patterned canvases. In Beside Vigil, a series of Judiths and Salomes be subservient to up the heads of male victims above a wallpaper background of R Cros logo and friendly nurtures In a cooler vein, Peter Shelton's chic mock-organic statuarys of bronze and steel are sensuous and seductive, despite their sheeny self-consciousness.

Perfectly valid installation art at Barnsdall by means of Kim Yasuda, Cliff Benjamin and Mark Niblock-Smith was totally eclipsed by dint of Visiting Hours, Bob Flanagan's overwhelming performance/installation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. A collaboration with photographer Sheree Rose this piece stretch outs autobiography into metaphor, unhesitatingly and convincingly transforming life into art. The life is not an ordinary individual Flanagan's painful battle with cystic fibrosis-a chronic disease affecting the lung and other organs--has l to a lifelong fascination with sexual masochism. The installation not awayed Flanagan's disease as an allegory, elaborated in a metrical composition titled "Why" that circled the gallery walls. Via a Whitmanesque list, the piece of poetry chronicled the history of the artist's masochistic obsession, from cartoon fantasies of "Porky Pig in bondage force-fed by means of some sinister creep in black cape" to his memories of the time he had "such a high febrile affection my parents had to strip me naked and wrap me in wet sheets to stop the convulsions."