Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition's best show in recent memory, "Tri-Annuale (Part 2)," is the perfect antidote to the glut of self-perpetuating circularity in much of today's L.A. art. Joni Mitchell's painting exhibition is an open system, relying on slippery fragments of technique, celebrity, and spectacle for its delightfully amorphous shape. Mitchell configures herself as an Old Master, showing landscapes, self-portraits and portraits (whose subjects range from Jimi Hendrix to Mitchell's cat, Nietzsche), all stroked thickly in oils. The works inhabit both failure and success, from a sublime intricacy of light above a simple snowy road to a silly rainbow hanging over the image of Mitchell making out with a fellow in a funny hat.

Most confoundingly, Mitchell's paintings seem to imagine there was no twentieth century between today and Van Gogh's day. This is both frustrating, as the works defy contemporary critical apparatuses whose foundations are in the modern, and comforting, as they ask one to reconsider principles no more complicated than the vanishing point. The works demand an exercise of mind reading, though, leading one to speculate on how much of Mitchell's intention is the dismissal or redirection of contemporary art dialogues, and how much is a naive practice of self-expression which has no concern for the rhetoric it generates. Joni Mitchell, whose authenticity has already been championed by multiple generations, certainly does not need my approval.

Fortunately, the twentieth century did happen, unraveling hidebound notions of meaning as it unwound itself. While Mitchell was writing about Woodstock, Warhol was folding celebrity and authenticity in on each other, dismantling Benjamin's aura like a child with a toy, only to reassemble it in his make-believe Factory. This history is not lost on Mitchell, whose anachronistic paintings refer to Warhol's displaced reproductions, and it is certainly relevant to Amy Adler, the show's curator, whose directorial presence transformed a solo painting show into a collaborative action. On a formal level, Mitchell and Adler already have strategies in common, both using intricate processes as tools for ambiguous self-representation.

Reconsidering each artist's work in the light of the other's becomes the prerogative of the informed viewer. Within this convoluted space, Mitchell and Adler rely on each other, refer to each other, even resemble each other. The opening reception for the show was certainly a performance, one in which Adler invited the art world to a party on its own turf hosted by a rock star. One observer brought his Joni Mitchell records, their album covers painted by the musician, hoping for autographs. Too-cool-for-school young artists, who have chatted with the likes of Richard Serra or Carolee Schneemann without batting an eyelash, stood with their mouths agape at their proximity to a pop legend. The work was not confined to the walls; it moved unpredictably about the room. One of Mitchell's best paintings offers a close perspective of the artist and a deer meeting eye-to-eye in profile, as small figures go about their own mediocre lives on the distant horizon. The quiet intensity of their stares reveals the respective animals' thought processes: each is wondering what the other is thinking. Unfortunately, humans and deer do not speak the same language and may only communicate in assumptions and speculations. This is the interaction which best describes the relationships among the paintings and the performance, among artists and spectators, among the present of this space and its many histories. We stand perplexed and amazed, not certain which eye to look into, as the elegant Joni Mitchell, like a Warhol Mona Lisa, stands in the center laughing it all away.

"TRI-ANNUALE (PART 2): AMY ADLER CURATES JONI MITCHELL," Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, December 1 - 23, 1999.