L.a. Confidential Pacific Standard Time In Los Angeles Galleries By Hunter Drohojowska-philp

Pacific Standard Time (PST), the Getty-funded initiative that's revitalizing the forgotten cultural beginnings of Southern

California, reigns this month in the museums and galleries around Los Angeles.

The PST focus on the areas post-war cultural history has inspired a number of galleries to dig into their inventory to present some

very intriguing, even surprising exhibitions.

The Box, an unassuming gallery in Chinatown operated by Mara McCarthy (daughter of performance artist turned sculptor Paul McCarthy),

has a well-earned reputation for showing tough-minded art from the recent past. Working with the estate of John Altoon(1925-1969),

the extremely popular if mentally unstable artist who showed with Ferus Gallery, McCarthy is presenting 40 examples of Altoon's

hilarious, ribald, unsettling drawings. All are 30 x 40 in. and made between 1966 and 1968, just a year before he died at the age of

43. They hang framed on a single wall.

Rendered in a wriggly black line with the occasional splash of color, Altoons women, with long wavy locks and voluptuous builds,

enjoy playfully erotic encounters with frogs, elephants, monkeys, pigs and, occasionally, men. The phallus appears as an independent

entity: a pole for a clothes line, stuck in a shoe, or a lovable pillar for a woman to hug. A modern Franois Boucher, Altoon made

drawings that appear effortless and ebullient. The drawings are $14,000 each. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art plans a

retrospective in 2013.

Also in Chinatown, Thomas Solomon Gallery shows three large-scale collages by Alexis Smith. In the 1970s, at the apex of the

Conceptual Art and Womens Movements, Smith combined both influences with a healthy dose of dry wit. Where others turned to

semiotics, she used the texts of Raymond Chandler, incorporating snippets of fortune cookie predictions, playing cards and tiny gold

stars.

In this show, an entire wall is given over toIsadora (1980-81), collaged elements on a corrugated paper background printed with blue

sea and tan mountains, with real starfish attached to the night sky. The sad but true text details the last days of Isadora Duncan.

The price is $100,000. Not for sale is a wall sculpture from 1976 consisting of a Plexiglas box containing a pair of paper coffee

cups. One cup is labeled Think in big dark letters, while tiny letters on the other read, He Who Thinks, Drinks from the Cup of

Fortune. That's something to think about.

Cirrus Gallery offers a retrospective view of its own involvement with contemporary art since its 1970 inception. Owner Jean Milant,

who trained as a printmaker with June Waynes Tamarind Lithography Workshop, published early editions with Bruce Nauman, John

Baldessari and Ed Ruscha. For this show, Milant worked with the young artist and curator Aaron Wrinkle to present a survey of

highlights from the gallerys past, along with work by young artists responding to that history.

The first of a four-part series, this show includes a piece that Baldessari originally conceived for the 1972 Documenta: An etching

of a pyramid hangs on a blue wall while a time-delay video of the viewer viewing the piece is projected in an adjacent gallery.

(Similar works appeared in his recent retrospective.) Milant also got permission from Ruscha to present in DVD format Premium, the

1971 movie directed by Ruscha and starring Larry Bell, Leon Bing, Tommy Smothers and Rudi Gernreich.

by: aarenbrowns

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