Angelenos in Paris

John Baldessari

On display: five conceptual wall pieces and two videos from 1963 to 1984

“Los Angeles art is very sexy in Europe now, and it has been for a few years. Not that it shouldn’t be, but it can be overvalued in the sense that just the fact that it’s from Los Angeles makes it good. That’s always a danger. It’s always interesting to see how Los Angeles is interpreted. It never seems to be right. When I’m saying right, that’s my point of view. Everyone’s got their own idea about the shape and form of art in Los Angeles. It’s a slippery subject. There are always inclusions and exclusions of artists that don’t make sense in these shows. It’s the view of who’s doing the selecting and who’s doing the writing. I wouldn’t want to be writing an essay about art from Paris because I would get a lot of things wrong. But ultimately, what matters is the quality of the work.”

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Judy Fiskin

On display: 26 photographs from her “Stucco” and “Deserts” series of 1972-76

“I think it’s going to make me feel incredibly nostalgic and sad to see other artists’ early works that I first saw as a student. But the show has been a big boon for me because of what I had to do to produce my work. I have been doing video for the last 10 years, so I finally dismantled my darkroom. I can’t make my own prints anymore. I needed new prints for some of the images in the show, so I found a guy -- Lane Barden, a photographer, printer and critic -- and worked with him for months until he could print my work. Because I was having to go through old proof sheets, finding negatives for him, I started seeing things and thinking, why didn’t I ever print that? Now he is making prints that I have never done for my next show. It never would have happened otherwise.”

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John Outterbridge

On display: three assemblages from his “Containment,” “Rag Man” and “Ethnic Heritage” series of the late 1960s and early ‘70s

“I would say my activity involves more audacity than anything else, the audacity to let art be anything it needs to be at a given time. The pieces in the show come from a time when I was very busy working at the Pasadena Art Museum and, after that, at the Watts Towers. I was stealing time to do my own work, late at night. The pieces look like that and smell like that. My “Containment” series refers to containment as a factor in our lives. The “Rag Man” series grew out of the civil rights movement; I refused to frame things conventionally because that seemed like putting them in a jailhouse. The “Ethnic Heritage” group was stimulated by my daughter’s interest in dolls. I am very happy that this work is considered to be part of a school of thought.”

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Lari Pittman

On display: three paintings from the mid-1980s

“I am at the end of the exhibition timeline. I barely squeaked in with a group of work roughly based around ideas of American citizenship. I expect that there will be very little painting in the show, so I’m excited to see what my work looks like in that historical arc of L.A. production. When I was doing those paintings it certainly wasn’t as fashionable to paint as it is now. I don’t know what the show will look like, but I absolutely have no anxieties about it being a European view of Los Angeles. My attitude is, it allows for some amplitude of interpretation. Let it fall where it may, like free-floating currency, and let’s not get bent out of shape that it’s not a particularized view of production. These shows by nature are messy and messes. One is happy, of course, to be included.”

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Betye Saar

On display: three assemblages from 1967 to 1975

“I love the idea of the show and I’m thrilled to participate in it because at the time my works were made there were not that many artists of color working, and very few women. It was pretty much white male. Catherine Grenier came by to visit the summer before last to look at my slides and selected eight or 10 pieces, but by the time they got the loan forms out, almost all of those pieces had gone to other exhibitions. Everyone wanted ‘Liberation of Aunt Jemima.’ It really pleases me that I have an icon, but I do other things. I held out ‘Aunt Jemima’ for the Pompidou, but it was hard to choose the other works. One is my first assemblage, ‘Vision of El Cremo,’ named for a cigar box cover, The other is ‘Indigo Mercy,’ an altar-like structure made from a California palm-frond table.”

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Alexis Smith

On display: a narrative work on paper from 1975 and a painted wall installation from 1982

“In terms of these big shows, I think there’s a sense that L.A. is a place apart, maybe because Los Angeles has always been in a second-class citizen’s position to New York. European institutions recognize that there’s a whole separate history that comes out of Los Angeles that has direct significance to them and doesn’t have to be seen through the American prism of New York. But history gets written down differently than it felt when you lived it. I will be showing ‘Madame Butterfly,’ a delicate paper piece from 1975 and ‘Ring of Fire,’ an installation from 1982. That’s a pretty good cross-section of my work during that period. But I won’t know what I think of the show until I see it. The period is so vast and some people have done very different kinds of work during that time.”