From Artforum.com
"Against the Grain"
LOS ANGELES CONTEMPORARY EXHIBITIONS
6522 Hollywood Boulevard
June 12–September 21
Responding in 1988 to the deep loss, widespread fear, oppressive sociopolitical conservatism, and aggressive culture of activism that characterized the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, writer Dennis Cooper and artist Richard Hawkins curated “Against Nature: A Group Show of Works by Homosexual Men” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). As a controversial gesture of defiance, it posited a model of individual agency based on an irreverence for societal norms and moral standards, paired with a decadent embodiment of sexual desires, addictions, anxieties, and illness. Provoking much criticism and anger at the time, especially from the activist community, the show became somewhat legendary and deeply influential in the local art world, cultivating cult status among supporters who admired its radical subversion.
Twenty years later, “Against the Grain,” curated by Christopher Russell for LACE, revisits “Against Nature” and plays off its name as the alternative translation of J. K. Huysmans’s classic tale of solitary sensual indulgence, À Rebours. Tracing lines of historical continuity between the two shows, specifically through pedagogical inheritances, Russell selects fourteen young local artists to establish an artistic lineage that stems from Cooper and Hawkins’s transgressive polemic and arrives at a contemporary gothic sensibility, retaining an affinity with the grotesque, the macabre, and the erotic. To this end, “Against the Grain” includes a ruinous model city by John Knuth. In the corner behind a cluster of aged and decaying cardboard skyscrapers lie the mummified remains of several rats buried in a pile of salt. Elsewhere, Ami Tallman’s watercolors of dead birds and lifeless rabbits insidiously dress morbidity in lurid and beguiling hues. Amy Sarkisian’s menacing Godzilla, 2008—a circle of blackened bat homes mounted on wooden posts and studded threateningly with spikes—looks like a medieval instrument of torture, while Robert Fontenot molds bread dough into humanoid figurines enacting diminutive tragicomic scenes of brutal decapitation, cannibalism, patricide, and anarchy. Though the exhibition’s desired radicality congeals at instances into mere stylization (Wendell Gladstone’s paintings come to mind), “Against the Grain” provocatively excites an undead moment in Los Angeles’s recent past and argues convincingly for the timely resuscitation of a gothic approach to the political.
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