Courtesy Judy Chicago. Photo: Donald Woodman.

Judy Chicago and Materials & Applications, "Disappearing Environments," 2012.

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Sure, if you arrived at Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2012 after seven last Thursday night, when the opening party ended, you had to lay down cash for your drinks. But outside, in the parking lot, the ice -- actually the dry ice -- was free. Thirty-seven tons of it, thanks to its implementation in a site-specific piece called Disappearing Environments.

The installation was a collaboration between artist Judy Chicago, known for her pioneering feminist work in the 1960s and 1970s, and Materials & Applications, a Silver Lake-based studio that combines notions architecture and art through experimentation.

As late afternoon gave way to dusk, as dusk gave way to night, steamy fog rose from a series of five-foot high pyramids built from blocks of the ice and lit by road flares to produce a seductive, elusive, ever-changing environment that enveloped fair attendees. Coinciding with the fair's opening bash, it became the instant must-post-on-Facebook-image, the art-fair-takeaway, the marker that you to had been there. But by the time the fair ended on Sunday, the piece had disintegrated. And that was the point.

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Courtesy of Night Gallery

At the ALAC art fair, Night Gallery showed Samara Golden's Rape of The Mirror: Bedroom, an installation with a video projection, mirror, and other materials

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"We have this enormous audience of almost 11,000," said Tim Fleming, director of Art Los Angeles Contemporary (ALAC), held at Barker Hangar and one of three art fairs in L.A. this past weekend. "And we can do anything with them, within reason."

This year, at the Thursday night opening of his fair, audiences encountered 25 tons of dry ice stacked in pyramids and lit with road flairs at dusk. Activist artist Judy Chicago had done the same thing in 1968 with Disappearing Environments -- for which she and artists Lloyd Hamrol and Eric Orr built a village of ice, lit it up, then waited for it to melt -- and its restaging launched Pacific Standard Time's Performance Festival as well as the fair.

The Performance Festival's curators, Glenn Phillips of the Getty and Lauri Firstenberg of LAX Art, approached Fleming last summer to ask if the fair would host the event. "At that point, no one knew how long the dry ice would last. They wanted a location people would revisit again and again," Fleming said, "and I think it helped that they knew what we did last year."

Last year's ALAC program included performances by Liz Glynn, an artist key to the planning of the current Pacific Standard Time festival, plus a magic show by Glenn Kaino and a parade of monsters costumed by artist Marnie Weber, though none of those performances had been "potentially hazardous" like Judy Chicago's flares and ice. "I swallowed a bit of the artwork," said Fleming, who still had smoke and mist in his lungs and eyes when he rushed off to meet with a group of bankers Thursday night. By Saturday, the still-steaming pyramids had turned to mounds. By Sunday, kids were kicking around what had become small grimy lumps.

Since starting his fair in 2010, Fleming has wanted to host an event that's decidedly cultural, where commerce is key but downplayed. Programming performance, the least commodifiable medium, helps bring together that mix of intellect, history, and spectacle, that, along with dealers with reputations and art objects with sway, are what you need for what Fleming calls "the art transaction" to take place. But what is the art transaction, exactly? And why does it seem to make people uncomfortable?

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jgarbee

The Hot Pink Catwalk Entry at the Affordable Art Fair

​What a difference a few blocks make in the theory of relativity of art value. Yesterday, we went to the L.A. Art Show: Modern & Contemporary at the L.A. Convention Center and the Affordable Art Fair at the event deck at L.A. Live, both of which run through Sunday.

To test your eye for blue chip art, in the photos that follow, guess which are from the L.A. Art Show, and which are from the Affordable Art Fair "side" of downtown. We'll give you the show and sticker price afterwards. The prize? Imagine the gallery director resume potential. Right. Turn the page.

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