Sun Setting on Summer, Charting Transcendence Gazes Westward and Beyond
Car culture is inseparable from the ethos of Los Angeles, even as the city is rapidly expanding its rail public transit network, partly in anticipation of the 2028 Olympics. Charting Transcendence generally finds a car helpful when making more than a few stops while museum and gallery hopping around town.
Peak summer is typically the slower season for the “art world,” but for Charting Transcendence, it’s been ripe with learning and discovery, laying solid groundwork for future growth and expansion across a national network of clients and creative ventures.
Taking advantage of a slower season in South Florida afforded rich opportunities to see art in ten other states from coast to coast (see CT’s most recent newsletters) and to further hone the constant practice of guiding art lovers through themselves and deeper consciousness towards transcendent experiences.
While anticipating fresh new impressions of contemporary art to be shared once the season gets into full swing again after Labor Day, I offer you CT’s latest content on Los Angeles, Black Art, and Classical Music.
Los Angeles Art Highlights
Provocatively hung in this election year, Our Flag (2017) is one of the most recent artworks by a 60-year stalwart of the Los Angeles pop art scene, Ed Ruscha (b. 1937), on view at his comprehensive retrospective Now Then at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art.)
Whether attributable to its quintessentially Western expanse of streets and boulevards or its lure of Hollywood fame, there is a certain vitality and dreamlike quality to Los Angeles.
This is the reason why LA has been a mainstay on Charting Transcendence’s circuit around the USA for some time now.
A recent four-day sojourn in Tinseltown afforded Charting Transcendence superlative opportunities to meet with new clients, old and new friends, as well as to see a tremendous amount of formidably great art.
In fact, in no other American city besides New York is there so much to encounter in such a rich context of historical influences and cultures as in Los Angeles.
Contemporary art and life in Los Angeles is inextricable from theater, Hollywood, as well as the bizarre and esoteric. This stage backdrop came from the former Masonic Temple on Wilshire Blvd. that is now the Marciano Art Foundation, on display at USC’s Fisher Museum of Art’s exhibition “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation.”
(The exhibition, on display until November 23, compellingly argues that queer communities in Los Angeles evolved by finding refuge in cultural diversions and interest groups fascinated by science fiction, paperback novels, the esoteric and occult.)
Kenny Scharf (b. 1958), who was friends with Keith Haring and Andy Warhol in the 1980s, maintains a robust practice and a rich visual iconography derived from the East Village’s street art era. Channeling the vibrancy of his hometown of LA is this fantasy painting of a psychedelically-graffitied emergency communications tower shown at Honor Fraser Gallery in Culver City.
Josh Kline (b. 1979) is a visionary American artist whose latest body of work, Climate Change, imagines the fallout of a future climate refugee crisis that will render parts of our country uninhabitable. His show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles following up on his 2023 retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum, is a “must-see” because it brings a contemporary crisis into exceptionally sharp focus.
Wendy Red Star (b. 1981) is broadly regarded as a leading Native American woman artist. LA’s Roberts Projects’ show The Hide Scraper features a typology of her own deskilled paintings of geometric designs of actual vintage Apsaalooke (Crow) buffalo-hide knapsacks, most of which are now in museums. Red Star’s primary mediums are photography and sculpture, making this particular body of work exceptional.
LA hosts numerous emerging artists and smaller galleries, many of which have sprung up in just the past several years. Along these lines, this lyrically abstract painting by Benjamin L. Turner is currently on view at Babst Gallery in a show entitled Elevated Ristretto Stutter.
Art of the African Diaspora
A sculpture by superstar Black feminist artist Simone Leigh, who represented the U.S at the Venice Biennale in 2022, on view at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Black art is some of the very best and most compelling art of the past 25 years, with its richness rooted in a heroic human struggle throughout the twentieth century (and up until today) against the patronizing and oppressive legacy of colonialism, for civil rights, and equal justice for all humankind.
Such art offers a window into life experiences and perspectives tempered by brutality and abuse while also providing evidence of how these toils and torments have been overcome by optimism and hope. In short, this renders the art more beautiful to the eye of the appreciative and sensitive viewer.
Zanele Muholi (b. 1972) is a non-binary photographer from South Africa whose images have become some of the most iconic photographic representations of black bodies in the past ten years. Their show at Cape Town gallery Southern Guild’s Los Angeles outpost features stunning new images and sculptures.
African-American artist Winfred Rembert 1954-2021), shown recently at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, has recently gained wider critical acclaim for his embossed shoe-polish-on-leather figurative works, depicting scenes from the rural Jim Crow south where he was raised. Oiled leather conveys a visceral quality for its similarity to human skin.
Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was an African American photojournalist and staffer for Life Magazine throughout the mid-late 20th century, capturing moments the history of segregation in the United States in vibrant color. His Foundation’s most recent show at Pace Gallery in LA features some true gems, never before exhibited.
David Kordansky Gallery, one of the best “one-stop shops” to see a lot of art under one roof in Los Angeles, recently presented a show of massive fired and glazed clay sculptures by South African artist Simphiwe Mbunyuza (b. 1989), who created them while on a recent artist’s residency in Montana. Pottery on this scale is rarely seen, less so in that with colors applied exclusively as glaze before firing.
A Most Peculiar Symphony: Haydn No. 60 The Distracted One
Cover art for Nuovo Aspetto’s 2017 recording of Haydn’s Symphony No. 60 Il Distratto (The Distracted One), which is Charting Transcendence’s pick for magnificent use of period instruments in an intimate chamber arrangement.
YouTube has free links to all movements of this masterpiece:
I. Agadio II. Allegro Molto III. Andante IV. Menuetto V. Presto VI. Adagio VII. Finale Prestissimo
The full album is also available on all streaming services.
By now most of my audience knows that I’m quite mad about classical music, especially that of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as the classical era slowly gave way to romanticism.
Something about the intersection of structure, development, and humanity of such complex expressions create and continually nurture deep meaning within my mind and soul.
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), the son of an Austrian wheelwright, dedicated over 60 years of his life entirely to music, becoming one of the most prolific and influential composers ever.
He provided formative instruction to both Mozart and Beethoven and left indelible marks on the evolution of Western music, one of the most complex and productive artforms of all of human creation.
Along the way Haydn composed no fewer than 106 symphonies, helping the form evolve from a niche orchestral arrangement into a sophisticated and grand genre, highly celebrated today and around the world.
One of the most unusual and peculiar of them is No. 60, one of several dozen named symphonies known as Il Distratto (Le Distrait, Der Zerstreute, or in English: The Distracted One) after a French play of the same name for which Haydn composed a score under commission from his patron, the Hungarian Prince Esterhazy.
Unfortunately, either the script did not survive the 18th century (as was common with much of creation before the modern era) or it fell into such deep obscurity that no one today really remembers or cares. Apparently, the plot centered on some sort of oblivious and bewildered gentleman (perhaps an 18th century version of Inspector Gadget or The Absent-Minded Professor?) with humorous and unexpected plot twists baked in.
View of the palace of Esterhaza in Hungary, where Franz Joseph Haydn resided in the mid-to-late 18th century in the court of Prince Esterhazy, his patron who commissioned the vast majority of his music, including Symphony No. 60 The Distracted One
Fortunately, Haydn reformatted the score into a symphony, popular enough to be preserved until present day. Although not performed as frequently as his blockbuster London symphonies or other works of the Sturm-und-Drang era, a few dozen recordings exist today, making it a discerning connoisseur’s choice without being considered too wildly obscure.
Highly unusual for Haydn’s symphonic works, Il Distratto has (instead of the typical three or four) six exquisitely seductive and heterogenous movements that — just as the name The Distracted One suggests — convey a certain humorous, bumbling, and quizzical feeling. This makes for a mash-up of fast, slow, and somewhat absurd-sounding melodies, combined to create a listening experience that is both whimsical and mysterious.
It’s almost as if the symphony loses its train of thought at points, meandering and lurching from one theme to another in a way unusual for the genre of that age, which tended to be more rigidly programmed and structured.
I highly recommend a movement or two of Nuovo Aspetto’s magnificent period-instrument ensemble arrangement of the piece, available on all streaming services including Spotify and Apple Classical, as we all lunch forward, bumbling from summer into a new season.
