Some of the most boring paintings in the world are also the most influential. Monet’s Water Lilies are on my mind—and apparently everyone else’s. The Lilies were a series of over 200 paintings created by an aging Monet, supposedly as a response to World War I—an effort to represent peace and tranquility. A meditation on quietude, simplicity and isolation by someone lucky enough to be able to spend two-hundred and fifty canvases worth of days doing that.
According to the online Cambridge, Meditation is “the act of giving your attention to only one thing, either as a religious activity or as a way of becoming calm and relaxed” or is “serious thought or study, or the product of this activity.”
One could argue that most paintings capture an artist’s meditation on something—color, pattern, form, figure, sound, a girlfriend, a patron’s horse, a sandwich, etc. The mere fact that a painter (rather than, say, an AI or a security camera) is trying to capture something either external or internal requires intent and that focused intent can be called meditation.
But the deeper sense of meditation—that is, a stillness resulting in some insight or enlightenment—is clearly implied. And, more to my point today, that deeper sense is denied when the product of all that meditating turns out to be something that existed long before the meditating started in basically the mind of everyone.
Los Angeles collectors have decided that two hundred is not enough. They are seeking out painters still willing to stare at flowers and cash-strapped galleries and delightfully uninspired painters are happy to oblige. The barely-viable offspring of the tired paint strokes captured in the Lilies can be seen all across the city in a profusion quite easily-ignored by anyone without a friend in the art business or a deadline to meet.
Two recent shows offer up this season’s version of such pricey dullness on opposite ends of the color spectrum. Water as-process-and-therefore-as-subject seems to be a connecting thread here.
At Francois Ghebaly, Lily Clark and Ash Roberts have somehow managed to make oil paintings of ponds even more somnolent and enervated. Robert’s paintings seem to capture the moment that water-meets-muddy-marsh seen in the corner of every Ophelia image ever made, but without any corpse complicating the composition or sense of placidity. Here the only genuine meditation seems to be on the question of how long can one reflect on a large muddy canvas intended to masquerade as a large muddy pond. Roberts invites us into a method for attempting to coax a painting out of nothingness, and then offers a demonstration of flailing nothingness so thorough one begins to wonder why you thought paint was capable of anything at all. Lily Clark’s sculptures, one a dripping rock placed above a basin, another with droplets released onto a stone and swirling before sinking into a hole are actually quite uninteresting reinventions of what gardeners call a “water feature” even on their own, but when paired alongside Roberts’ kitschy sludge, they make me wish that the taught string holding Clark’s boulder would simply snap while I was under it, thus hastening into reality the infinite sleep the art encouraged.
Better placed in a Studio City health spa’s faux-Zen garden, the Clark Roberts show could very well be the most boring show I’ve seen in Los Angeles ever. Do the exhibition-goers fawning over the Clark and Roberts think that being calm is akin to being revolutionary? In Los Angeles, a land of post-hippie delusion, I suspect that yes, yes they do. There is an unavoidable late-feminist argument that unobtrusive florals are a powerful assertion of womanly aesthetics and that undemandingly suasive images comfort the afflicted—the afflicted being, in this case: sensitive girls and gays for whom the nation’s right-wing convulsions and considerations thereof are all too much. If this is their defense, however, the only thing Clark and Roberts are offering that a bath bomb does not is a heftier price tag.
Across Sante Fe Avenue, Vielmetter Gallery provided a similarly damp offering in Rodney McMillian’s paint poured and swirled on quilts and paper. Here the meditation—on the movement of paint in teal, pinks, and blues–again offers not much other than an invitation to meditate on how the paint sure has swirled. It’s less pretty than “pretty”—lacking even the mild disjuncture’s characteristic of truly passionate decorative art. Similarly, the petal-strewn canvases of the well-named Flora Yukhnovich that finished their run at Hauser and Wirth last month attempted to reinject Baroque vivacity into their thoroughly Rococo subject with the same not-quite-confrontational come-hither-vigor as Miley Cyrus strutting around LA in gold lamé in the music video for her still-ubiquitous mall-pop earworm Flowers.
Water and wallpaper and a lustlessly growing immanency appear to be contemporary art’s most signature response to this collapsing world. We are all Opheliacs now.
Image: Courtesy of François Ghebaly