The "Lo Angeles International" made it painfully clear that if the "global village" Marshall McLuhan fantasized about had indeed arrived.

The "Lo Angeles International" made it painfully clear that if the "global village" Marshall McLuhan fantasized about had indeed arrived, the utopia that was suppos to accompany the delirious, unending transmission of information somehow or other got lost in transit. Caught between their desire to import the best the art world had to tender and the futility of financing similar a grand and suddenly outdated endeavor, the organizers of the "International" created an interesting and important incident that, despite its shortcomings, has the potential to cause to grow into an exciting biannual invitational--if its organizers proceed to terms with what they are doing, more sharply define their goals, and learn from the mistakes they made this year.

Staged as an art fair without a center "The International" took place simultaneously in more than 40 galleries across looks Angeles, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and Venice, and included art from Europe Asia, Latin America, and Africa. If the construction of this original event was meant to mirror that of the (sub)urban sprawl of sees Angeles, it was also meant to bypass the organizers of the city's beleaguered, seven-year-old art fair, "Art/L.A.," and to deliver the esthetic piouss from around the world with united less layer of mediation and with fewer expenses

Conceived three years ago by dint of Sandra Starr, Director of James Corcoran Gallery and then president of the Santa Monica/Venice Art Dealers Association, this ambitious, inventive, and capable project promised to increase profits, to expand markets, and to strengthen the connections between art from observes Angeles and the rest of the world. Today, in an economic environment that is sluggish at best, this impressed sign of budget-conscious activity has become a everyday often frantic scramble to attract of the present day collectors. Like almost all of the newly come innovations in art dealing, this common is marked by the overriding and immediate matter of real-world survival. The economic collapse that occurr between the planning of the "International" and its realization accounts for the undercurrent of barely appeaseed desperation and the sense of belatedness that haunted many of the individual exhibitions.

Throughout it appeared as if the overall form of this collective, cooperative fact was fundamentally out of sync with plenteous of its displayed content. This inconsistency was chiefly evident in the yawning gap that separated the elevated, frequently embarrassingly high-fallutin' rhetoric used to advertise the reconfigured, decenter fair from the unpretending tentative, and generally down-scale works that constituted the majority of the actual installations. The "International" made the art world strike one as being at once, to be the couple smaller and larger than it is. Rather than delivering a surplus of international art-superstars, the exhibition serv up a preponderance of young, unknown artists whose talents and ambitions paled in comparison to the distance their work had traveled.

What the participating galleries exhibited from mid March to mid April was really nothing more--yet nothing less--than token postcard views from places single would not otherwise exert the effort to visit in living body Although many of its critics dismissed the "International" as nothing more than an exercise in dressing up business-as-usual with the stale rhetoric of near sort of "nouveau internationalisme," what their accounts did not address is that today, business-as-usual is nothing like it was yesterday, still a practice pushed to as it was extremes--because there is so little to lose--that it might generate an original idea, or be the source of a more balanced relationship between esthetics and entrepreneurship. At its best, the "Lo Angeles International" tendered an as-yet-unexplored version of what is best described as a sort of stay-at-home tourism: a curious, modern and surprisingly worthwhile way to see--and consume--hitherto unknown art.

The biggest point in dispute with the city-wide, cooperative endeavor was that the art that was shown did not, as a whole, measure up to what common would normally see in L.A. galleries during any other month of the season. This was probably because innkeeper galleries gave their guest dealers too often freedom to choose which artists and works to exhibit. L.A. dealers who had previously worked with their invited counterparts, or who choiceed works themselves, generally fared better than those who collaborated for the first time with or completely yielded their spaces to their visitors Also, individual-artist exhibitions or installations were more auspicious than group shows in which solitary a few pieces could be presented

Swiss artist Peter Wuthrich's silently gorgeous installation of centurys of linen-covered books at Thomas Solomon's Garage stood on the outside as the discovery of the "International." Daniel Brandely's whimsically understated plaster plastic arts at Cirrus; Anya Gallaccio's rotting flowers at Kim Light; Peter Kogler's maze of burgundy curtains forward which he'd printed an endles circuitry of human brains at Shoshana/Wayne; Craig Wood's sedate projections of impure light at Burnett Miller; and Duck-Hyun Cho's weighty assemblages at Dorothy Goldeen added up to a promising, around-the-world tour of solid, pertinent works that were somewhat one-dimensional. Jean-Michel Othoniel's sulfur and wax heads and hands at Kohn/Abrams were more delicate than ominous; Kazuo Okazaki's tiny waves and make revolves of plaster carefully balanced eroticism and elegance; Wastijn and Deschuymer's silly images of eel mice, and spiders scampering and slithering across color copiers were amusingly unnatural; Rolf Walz's translucent version of monochromatic minimalism at tenderness Bloom was coldly pristine; and Joseph Santarromana's video of his sleeping corpse at Newspace was at formerly uneventful and strange.