Made in La 2016: a, the, Though, Only

This year’s edition of the Hammer biennial luxuriates in the de-materialized, the ephemeral, and the transitory.

- Shana Nys Dambrot

Organized by Hammer curator Aram Moshayedi and Hamza Walker, director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, Made in LA 2016: a, the, though, only is the third iteration of the Hammer’s official biennial. Where the previous two offered a sprawling anti-monumental collection of physically ambitious works, and a more confined but decidedly historiographic surveille, the latest edition is an amorphous show for a decentralized city; a conceptual pageant of emptiness reflecting a city that’s more idea than place. The show’s didactic text announces that it includes dance, fashion, literature, music, film, and performance, seeming quite proud of the exhibition’s relative shapelessness and its enchantment with the most self-consciously weird in-between practices to the exclusion of aesthetic or narrative. Painting, photography or sculpture are hardly mentioned, and are indeed included in sufficiently low ratio to underscore this shift in emphasis.

Made in LA 2016: a, the, though, only was subtitled by the minimalist poet Aram Saroyan, and perfectly encapsulates the institution’s approach and accurately reflects the current international fad for de-materialized, de-skilled, aggressively conceptual, sensorial elusive practices that deliberately conflate being avant-garde and being inaccessible. This approach luxuriates in the ephemeral, the transitory, the enacted rather than the produced—whether as circumstance or motif. Even the examples of conventionally understood art objects flirt with unbeautiful immateriality or a kind of automated gesturalism that focuses on idea rather than material, regional style, history, or identity.