Alex Israel. Waves

Alex Israel. Waves
20.03.2018 - 28.04.2018
Opening: 17.03.2018 11:00

curator:
Karin Pernegger

SPF-18, released via Netflix and iTunes, is the first feature-length movie by the L.A. based artist Alex Israel (b. 1982). The plot, in the form of a coming-of-age drama, deals with a number of surfing kids at Malibu beach. Four teenagers meet at Keanu Reeves’s beach house and talk about their growing up, their longings and desires. “18-year-old Penny Cooper spent years pining for Johnny Sanders Jr., but when a mysterious musician shows up on the beach, Penny is torn.” (IMDb) The narrator (Goldie Hawn) comments the action quite fittingly: “When you grow up in L.A., real life and the movies can get a little mixed up.”

Hollywood and its popular culture are the main starting point for Alex Is-rael's artistic practice. In his works, he reflects on the Hollywood cult, with its celebrities and its film industry, as a transfer of the American Dream, and in this sense also uses its instruments, like self-created talk shows, TV studio sets and props, and now also a complete movie production. At Kunstraum Innsbruck, he presents his latest picture series Waves as well as the movie SPF-18, which will have its Austrian cinema premiere on Saturday, March 16, at 11:00 a.m., at Leokino 1, followed by a conversa-tion with the artist and the exhibition opening, at 01:00 p.m., at Kunstraum Innsbruck.

“Based in Los Angeles, Israel engages with the particular culture of the local film and media industries. Mining the ‘food chain’ of show business, he interrogates and confounds the fine line between ‘talent’ and ‘raw ma-terial’ while re-framing and re-presenting manufactured items whose for-mal and auratic properties are often overlooked. For Israel, the American dream, as embodied by the Los Angeles mythos, remains affecting and potent. Channeling celebrity culture as well as the slick appearance and aspirations of the entertainment capital, Israel approaches his hometown with an uncanny coupling of local familiarity and anthropological curiosity. His work alludes to both California cool and calculated brand creation, embracing clichés and styles that exude the hygienic optimism endemic to the local scene.” (from a Gagosian Gallery press release)

Making the movie, Alex Israel set himself the goal of showing students how to be creative. “The movie was built on the idea that creativity can help you find your voice. (...) Each of the characters follows a creative path, which helps them evolve and make the transition from youth into adulthood,” the artist has put it. Before releasing the movie, Israel went to twelve High Schools all over the country, in order to present it to students and enter into conversation with them.

Israel himself directed the movie and wrote the script together with Mi-chael Berk, no less, who produced and wrote the original Baywatch series (from 1989 onwards) and also its remake (from 2017). The cast includes up-and-coming actors like Carson Meyer, Noah Centineo, or Bianca A. Santos, as well as actor icons of the eighties and nineties like Pamela An-derson, Keanu Reeves (known for instance for his role in the surfing gangster movie Point Break from 1991), Molly Ringwald (e.g. The Break-fast Club, 1985), or Rosanna Arquette, in order to deliberately inscribe the movie among the genre of the Malibu beach and surfing teen series like Baywatch, Beverly Hills 90210, or O.C. California, resp. John Hughes movies (e.g. Ferris Bueller's Day Off, 1986). The film was shot at Harry Gesner's iconic Wave House in Malibu (built in 1957), whose peculiar wave shape later also influenced the design of the Sydney Opera House (built between 1959 and 1973 by Jørn Utzon). The music comes from the band Duran Duran, the cover of whose fourteenth studio album Paper Gods the artist designed in return in 2015. The soundtrack too pays trib-ute to the eighties and includes songs like “Hungry Like The Wolf” by Duran Duran, “Video Killed The Radio Star” by The Buggles, “True” by Spandau Ballet, “Everywhere” by Fleetwood Mac, or “Iceblink Hide” by Cocteau Twins.

The exhibition presents various colour variants of a stylised wave, sewn from a neoprene fabric and stretched on canvas. This set is supplement-ed by two Wet Suit Portraits, i.e. two full-body aluminium sculptures in the shape of a neoprene suit, made according to the artist's own measure-ments. In the film self-designed neoprene suits also play a role, as does the question by a young musician whether making music one should be influenced by market-oriented mainstream output of music labels. The wave reminds us of the 19th century Japanese woodcut “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” by Katsushika Hokusai, yet also carries deliberate refer-ences to pop art.

In his works Alex Israel continually pays tribute to the glossy dream world of the Hollywood film studios. In his TV talk show As it Lays (named after the 1970 novel Play it as it lays by Joan Didion on the consumption-oriented rise of California), released on YouTube in 2012, for example, he interviewed Hollywood celebrities, such as movie producer Jon Peters (e.g. Batman, 1989), TV director, producer and script writer Darren Star (e.g. Melrose Place, 1992 to 1999, or Sex and the City, 1998 to 2004), writer Bret Easton Ellis (e.g. American Psycho, 1991), reality TV star, fashion designer and model Whitney Port, or the British hairstylist Vidal Sassoon, in order to create, with the help of dry humour and ironic ques-tions, a persiflage of the Hollywood movie industry. Thus he asked the publisher Larry Flynt where he bought his clothes, the actor Rosanna Arquette if she skyped, Steven Dorff whether he was right- or left-handed, Christina Ricci what she thought about online shopping or if she would change anything about the ten commandments, or the musician Marilyn Manson which drink he ordered when going to a bar. In the course of the project he also began to design the TV set in the style of eighties breakfast shows, in pink and orange shades à la Ed Rusha, and had other artistic works produced by the workshops of the Warner Broth-ers studios.

His series of self-portraits, painted using airbrush on fibreglass panels, appeared immediately after. His likeness had already appeared in the lav-ish video opening titles for As it Lays. This strategy clearly indicates that Israel’s artistic practice is closely interwoven with the Hollywood movie industry/culture and that he constantly blurs the boundaries between re-ality and fiction.

Alex Israel was born in 1982 in Los Angeles, California. He received his B.A. in 2003 from Yale University, Connecticut, and his M.F.A. in 2010 from the University of Southern California, Roski School of Fine Arts, Los Angeles. Israel’s works are in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City (2012); Alex Israel: Lens, LA><ART, Los Angeles (2013); Le Consortium, Dijon (2013); Alex Israel at The Hunting-ton, The Huntington Library, Art Collection, and Botanical Garden, Califor-nia (2015); Sightings: Alex Israel, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2015–16); #AlexIsrael, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2016); and Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings, Jewish Museum, New York (2016–17).

With kind support by Gagosian Gallery and Peres Projects, Berlin.