KEY POINTS:
MEG CRANSTON: HOT PANTS IN A COLD COLD WORLD: WORKS 1987-2007
(Artspace & Clouds $75)
Reviewed by Richard Dale
To anyone looking in - especially from this area of the world - the Los Angeles art scene can be: a) daunting, b) too exclusive and c) too cool to do anything but make you feel like crap.
Take LA artist Meg Cranston's story of Paris Hilton and Rem Koolhaas. Cranston is at the opening of a new Prada store on Rodeo Drive, glitterati everywhere including Koolhaas, who happens to be one of the most significant international architects of the past 20 years - and a great self-promoter.
Hilton walks in. So Koolhaas goes down this big staircase to introduce himself to her and "she looks at him and just turns her back", according to Cranston. "He looks momentarily crestfallen. He's just standing there while the paparazzi are calling her name."
Cranston's conclusion? "LA will humble anyone."
This is the only name-dropping moment in what is otherwise a crisp account of the artist's life, Hot Pants in a Cold Cold World, in which she seemingly survives quite well in the dystopia that is Los Angeles, despite close encounters with Paris Hilton.
The book, with an interview and an essay, gives good coverage: how Cranston came to the city, her study at the California Institute of the Arts, influences by an earlier generation of LA artists - Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, Liz Larner - and her work to date. And there is a lot to cover, filling nearly 200 pages, with each work given generous space in full colour.
Cranston's art-making sees her respond, like others of her generation, to opportunities with a gamut of different practices. At one point, she is painting, then making sculpture, next a performance or installation. No work is like another and to see the range on display in the book is breathtaking.
We got a sense of this last August with her solo show, The Pleasure of Obvious Problems, at Artspace on K Rd, dominated by a sculpture - a gigantic room-filling balloon - being Cranston's idea of the amount of air likely to be breathed when reading the complete works of her favourite author, Jane Austen. It showed how her work has as much a literary as a visual quality to it. Both seem to have equal importance: at the end of the book she says: "The fundamental problem of art is finding a suitable form - a shape for your philosophy, a form that is as persuasive as language."
This is also the first and most substantial artist's monograph that Artspace has published for several years and, as a full gloss number, it is certainly an impressive achievement. The pity of it, however, is that the book didn't appear at the time of the exhibition. Cranston's art is the sort that is really easy to get, but hard if you don't, which is why critique and context are helpful - especially for exhibitions by artists outside our regional purview.
Her work has a characteristically LA feel to it. The essay by fellow Angeleno Carole Ann Klonarides, in her readings of the art, tell us little more than the preceding interview with Cranston by New Yorker Nico Israel, and could have expanded either on the biography or on the LA art context in which Cranston operates - providing, in other words, a way in.
If the publication seems to be geared towards an American readership, it certainly isn't towards a local one. There is no mention of any outcome from Cranston's time here, neither the Artspace exhibition nor her residency at Elam, and no introduction by the gallery director providing a rationale for the publication. I would have thought, given Artspace's semi-public status, its priority with publications of this substance would be towards a New Zealand artist.
* Richard Dale is an Auckland art critic.
