by Alex Wells
Perhaps the most distinctive of the LA art fairs that parasitize off of Frieze Los Angeles, the Feliz Art Fair is the one held in the Roosevelt Hotel—and not in some suite of conference-rooms either, but in the actual hotel rooms, one room per gallery. Art behind every door. Throughout cabana-suites and a pair of upper floors, novel, exhausting and hard to ignore. Art on beds, in bathrooms, and on patios. While a space at Felix lacks Frieze’s hefty five-figure-minimum price tag, it is invite-only for gallerists, ensuring that this hipster hall-crawl is populated solely by someone’s idea of the cream of the crop of mid-tier and emerging spaces.
If you don’t mind crowded elevators and corridors, it’s fun. But what of the art? Is the vibe noticeably different from that at Frieze? It is. This year the works on display exhibit an intense energy of whimsy. Politics and the world situation are too heavy to be dealt with here, and the artists—one senses—would not insult the oppressed peoples of the world by presuming to speak on their behalf and someone on TikTok is probably doing that better than they ever could so here is a painting of a hot fudge sundae, here is a shoe made of something a shoe’s not usually made from, here’s a surreal lady with sexy lips in the wrong place. Craft is embraced. Not craft in the sense of concentrated attention to the work (if anything, there’s a delightfully slapdash quality to some of the best pieces) but craft in the sense of clay, glassmaking, textiles and other media frequently considered too domestic (too redolent of the feminine?) to really result in art. The pieces tend toward the small, the humorous, the anecdotal, the popular, the festive while maintaining or trying to maintain just enough contemplative distance or expressionistic flourish to make them not look like something in an expensive stationery store. They more-often-than-not eschew rigor, shock, classicism and text (fragmentary or explanatory).
Previously only-semi-canonical figures such as Red Grooms. Marisol Escobar and the Hairy Who emerge retrospectively as titans of influence while heavy hitters like Joseph Beuys and Marina Abramović might as well never have existed. Is this a new zeitgeist? Or just what happens when art has to fit into a Hollywood hotel?
IMAGE: Caterpillar, 2023 by Mischa Kalm