Hello, Los Angeles!

The rain has brought relief from the fires — along with some blessedly clean air — but it has also generated a risk of mudslides. Here’s hoping we are turning a corner on these disasters.

I’m Carolina A. Miranda, and I’m here to offer a little distraction with this week’s edition of Art Insider…

A Very Good Idea

On Saturday, the Center for the Less Good Idea, an interdisciplinary group in South Africa co-founded by renowned visual artist William Kentridge, will kick off a week-long residency in Los Angeles. And I couldn’t be more thrilled. 

Late in 2022, I caught the group’s performance of Houseboy at REDCAT, a play inspired by the novel of the same name by Cameroonian author Ferdinand Oyono (who died in 2010). It centers on the story of a boy, Toundi Ondoua, who, in an effort to escape an abusive father, ends up laboring in the home of a colonial commandant as a houseboy. Once there, he must navigate a maze of manners and politics. 

Oyono’s novel is written in the form of a diary left behind by Toundi — and the play largely adhered to this format. An on-stage narrator read excerpts of the diary as actors portrayed scenes on stage. Functioning as backdrop was a painting by Kentridge; providing the striking musical interludes was a pair of live musicians. But what kept me nailed to my seat throughout its two-hour run-time were the twists and turns of the story, not to mention the skill of the actors — Alfred Motlhapi, as the young Toundi, brought an exuberant charm to the role, and Sue Pam-Grant as the commandant’s wife, perfectly channeled duplicitousness. 

Houseboy digs into the paternalism and racism of colonialism. It’s also an incisive investigation into the psychology of a youthful domestic worker who finds himself contending with the machinations of the powerful. Toundi not only faces the relentless humiliations inflicted upon him by the commandant and his wife, he also bears witness to their most intimate secrets. This knowledge makes him vulnerable — and ultimately serves as a source of his undoing. 

For years, this has been one of those works that I wish I’d written about while its ideas were still fresh in my brain. Thankfully, the troupe’s new residency has given me a do-over of sorts. Starting on Saturday, the Centre for the Less Good Idea is kicking off a series of events around Los Angeles titled Three Less Good Ideas, in connection with the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, CAP UCLA, and The Broad museum.

A scene from Houseboy by the Centre for the Less Good Idea. (Zivanai Matangi)

Kentridge is best known as a visual artist. In late 2022, he was the subject of a remarkable one-man show at The Broad that presented his drawings, animations, and films — many of which grapple with questions of social justice and South Africa’s legacy of racial apartheid. For years, he has also dabbled in performance. In 2010, for example, he staged Shostakovich’s opera The Nose at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, which recounts the surreal tale of a Russian official who wakes up one day to discover that his nose has escaped from his face and is running around St. Petersburg pretending to be an important officer. I managed to catch the show in New York and it was a work of incredible imagination.

In 2016, Kentridge furthered his commitment to performance by teaming up with artist Bronwyn Lace to establish the Center for the Less Good Idea, a hybrid incubator space based in Johannesburg, in which projects emerge through the collaborative work of the artists rather than via some preset seasonal itinerary. 

The center's name is taken from a Tswana proverb: “If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.” As Kentridge has said of the group’s mission, “Often, you start with a good idea. It might seem crystal clear at first, but when you take it off the proverbial drawing board, cracks and fissures emerge in its surface, and they cannot be ignored. It is in following the secondary ideas, those less good ideas coined to address the first idea’s cracks, that the Centre nurtures.”

Judging by the performance I saw of Houseboy, the less good idea can be pretty great — so do not miss the troupe while they're in town.

William Kentridge presents his performance/lecture "Defending the Less Good Idea." (Zivanai Matangi)

Here’s a roundup of what’s going down:

Performances will kick off with A Defense of the Less Good Idea at the Nimoy in Westwood on February 1st, organized by CAP UCLA. This will include three short-form works — Mnquma, Commission Continua, and Umthandazo — as well as a hybrid performance-lecture by Kentridge and Lace. The event is sold out, but there will be a standby line; get more details at cap.ucla.edu.

At the Wallis, the center will be staging five performances of The Great Yes, The Great No, a chamber opera directed by Kentridge with Phala and Nhlanhla Mahlangu that imagines the dramatic escape of several important cultural figures from Nazi-occupied France, including surrealist André Breton, painter Wifredo Lam, and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The shows run from Wednesday, February 5th to Saturday, February 8th; find tickets at thewallis.org.

On Sunday, February 2nd, The Broad will host Unsettled Voices, a hybrid musical and spoken-word performance featuring Tongva musician Lazaro Arvizu Jr. and violinist Lynn Daphne Rudolph, who is of Khoi Khoi descent (a southern African ethnicity). The performance will include a call-and-response element that incorporates the audience and will explore notions of reconciliation. While not conceived by the Centre for the Less Good Idea, Unsettled Voices was informed by the Centre’s approach. Get more details at thebroad.org.

Sort of related: are you intrigued by Houseboy? Thankfully, the Centre has uploaded a 2021 staged reading to their YouTube channel. I also highly recommend Oyono’s short but very sharp novel, which you can find here.

A scene from The Great Yes, The Great No, going on view at the Wallis (Monica Rittershaus)

Last Chance

O.C.-raised, New York-based painter Fred Tomaselli has a solo show at the Laguna Art Museum that brings together a selection of recent works. And it couldn't be more timely since his hallucinatory, multimedia paintings frequently reflect on nature’s challenged states. Also on view are pieces from his New York Times series, in which the artist reworks the urgent themes generally plastered on the front page of the paper in poignant ways. Fred Tomaselli: Second Nature, is on view through Sunday. Get the deets at lagunartmuseum.org.

Fred Tomaselli's 2019 painting "Cloud" captures the start of a fire. (Carolina A. Miranda)

Link Drop

• As Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders go into effect, institutions such as the National Gallery of Art are forced to end diversity programs.
• Hyperallergic digs into the precursor of the Nazi salute, the Roman salute, which appears to have its origins in painting and cinema.
• The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott has an interesting piece on Trump’s executive order pushing “traditional” architecture — and how it conflicts with his expressed admiration of data centers.
• East of Borneo has compiled a list of resources for artists affected by the fires.
• Plus, Andrew Berardini has a poignant essay about the fires in Artforum.
• LA artist Ozzie Juarez talks about how swap meets inspired an installation for the upcoming Frieze Los Angeles art fair.
• The Mona Lisa will get her own exhibition space at the increasingly overcrowded Louvre in Paris.
• Lily Worcester writes about what it’s like to end up in a widely disseminated photo next to the wife of a reviled dictator.
• A fascinating essay in the New York Review of Books examines the ways in which women were quite literally silenced in Renaissance Italy via convents and institutional homes.
• Signing off with this incredibly tempting recipe for a whole steamed fish by Hsiao-Ching Chou for Lunar New Year.

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