Los Angeles has long been known as one of the best places on Earth to be an artist just getting started. Affordable rent, plentiful exhibition opportunities and collectors on the lookout for inexpensive art -- which just might be the next big thing -- make for a scene filled with possibilities.
What doesn't make the headlines is what happens next: when the difficulties of being a mid-career artist replace the promise of emerging, when the honeymoon's over, artistic accomplishment begins to count for more than the shimmer of potential, and the long grind sets in.
Collectors are often blamed for not sticking with artists as their prices rise, preferring newer and cheaper works by the next crop of artists or investing in super-expensive pieces by artists whose reputations are well established.
But an exhibition of works by the nine artists who won the 2008 City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowships suggests that the situation is more complicated than that -- and much crueler: that most artists who make it to mid-career status never get through this often drawn-out phase, instead getting stuck in the purgatory of never quite making it to the next level.
At the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Art Park, all of the award winners were born from 1945 to 1969. All reside in Los Angeles. And all were born outside L.A.
One of the best things about the exhibition is that it is really nine solo shows. The panel of experts who selected the $10,000 winners in the visual arts has brought together works that flaunt material and conceptual diversity, although there is no painting or sculpture included. Mix-and-match hybridity -- such as collaged drawings or photo installations or sprawling assemblages -- makes for an odd sort of orthodoxy. It's where the conformity is found.
The majority of works are neither memorable nor irritating in the get-under-your-skin, stick-in-your-craw way of art worth mulling over. For the most part, originality takes a back seat to uninspired attempts to elaborate on respected precedents.
Timothy Nolan, for instance, has arranged 42 mirrored modules with triangular sides on one gallery's floor. Abutting one another at odd angles, they break up space rather playfully and, when spotlights are aimed at them, throw squiggly reflections across the walls. Think Robert Smithson without the social implications or Jim Isermann without the bittersweet optimism. In short, this is a designer replay of adventuresome art, offering little more than pleasant recollections.
