Jeanne Dunning Untitled, 1991-93 Andy Warhol Van Heusen (Ronald Reagan) 1985 Richard Prince Untitled, 1993 Christopher Wool Untitled, 1996 Peter Halley Installation view Kohn Turner Gallery, 1996 Peter Halley Installation view Kohn Turner Gallery, 1996 Charles Long "Our Bodies - Our Shelves" 1996

letter from L.A. by Jane Hart The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art has always cultivated close ties to its artist constituency--ties that can prove useful at fundraising time. MOCA's June 8 Biennial Art Auction is a highlight of the season as usual. This year the event will be held for the first time at the Bergamot Station gallery complex in Santa Monica. This gala evening includes both the auction of nearly 300 artworks by leading contemporary artists and could raise $500,000 for the museum. The list of artists whose work will be auctioned reads like a Who's Who of new and senior contemporary masters, from Artschwager, Baldessari and Bourgeois to Stockholder, Thater and Wool. Sotheby's chairman Christopher Burge will conduct. Tickets to the gala, sponsored in part by Ian Schrager Hotels, go for $250 and $400. The Schrager Hotel Group, celebrated for its ultra-trendy Morgans, Royalton and Paramount hotels in New York; and for it's white- hot Delano Hotel in Miami Beach, has recently purchased Los Angeles' sagging and dated-looking Mondrian Hotel, whose facade some might remember was painted in the mid- 80s by Yaacov Agam as an homage to Piet Mondrian. Schrager paid $17.4 million for the Mondrian earlier this year and plans to spend another $15 million to completely transform it under the creative direction of designer Philippe Starck (who also did the Royalton, Paramount and Delano). The Mondrian is scheduled to reopen Nov. 1, 1996, and promises to be a primary destination for the hip and haute Hollywood-bound. Says Starck of his vision "I think the interesting thing of the city is that you will never know it completely. It's too big, and its like ...a labyrinth, a mystery. But mainly mystery is dark, and for me this one is completely white. A white mystery. The hotel will be a white mystery." In addition to Starck, a major contemporary artist will be involved with the project. No one is saying who, though one clue is that the artist was recently the subject of a MOCA exhibition. And if you guessed Claes Oldenburg you would be wrong. The hotel will acquire a fresh name with its new persona, but that is a detail which has, as of yet, not been decided. Down the block from the Mondrian on the Sunset Strip, at Bar Marmont, artist and now publisher Peter Halley recently hosted a party for his new magazine Index, edited by writer and curator Bob Nickas and designed by Laura Genniger. Many of the L.A. art world's hippest, including Clyde Beswick, Shaun Caley, Christopher Grimes, Michael Kohn, Barbara Kruger, Stephen Prina, Jeff Poe, Bill Radawec, Tom Solomon and James Welling, were in attendance. The intimate event honored the cover boy of Index No. 3, actor Udo Kier. Halley wants his magazine to have a bare bones look, in contrast to the present glut of periodicals that look like they've run amok on the Mac. Halley was in town recently installing a group of new, gorgeously colorful works at Kohn/Turner. L.A.'s long hot summer should be enlivened by the L.A. Freewaves 5th Celebration of Independent Video Etc., a landmark series of events and installations founded by Freewaves director Anne Bray. The festival kicks off with Private TV, Public Living Rooms , a weekend-long series at MOCA's recently renamed Geffen Contemporary [see "The Endless Column" in ArtNet Magazine's news section for details] running from Fri. Aug. 9 to Sun. Aug. 11. The series of events promises videos, CD-ROMs, Web sites and installations by over 140 artists, assembled by Abe Ferrer, Joe Lewis and a team of 12 curators. After its premiere, the festival will disperse to several other sites and institutions throughout Southern California, including the Long Beach Museum of Art, L.A.C.E., the Santa Monica Museum, Watts Tower Arts Center, the Armory Center for the Arts, the Huntington Beach Art Center, Laguna Art Museum Annex at South Coast Plaza and Self-Help Graphics. Also, watch that dial. The festival includes five half- hour programs of video art to be aired on 32 public-access cable stations across the country. Other news from around town: Fran Seegull, the standout curator of the Peter and Eileen Norton Family Foundation for over five years, has resigned to seek an MBA. She's to start at either Harvard or Stanford in the fall. Is her departure from the art world permanent? Who knows, but for the time being she will be shifting her focus from the business of art to the art of business. Her successor at the Norton Family Foundation has not yet been named. Connie Butler, formerly curator at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, New York and Artists Space in New York City, has recently joined the staff of the L.A MOCA. Her duties include oversight of MOCA's recent bequest of the Marcia Weisman collection of works on paper. The Weisman gift includes funds to establish a study center at the museum (scheduled to open in 1997) and also provides for acquisitions of works on paper. After 23 years in business, Dorothy Goldeen has decided to close her gallery. She started at San Francisco's Hansen Fuller Gallery, which went on to become Fuller Goldeen, and subsequently owned her own gallery, operating in a number of different spaces since moving to L.A. in 1987. Among the artists she has shown are Paik, Abakanowicz, Alan Rath, Chihuly, Adam Ross, Diana Thater and Jennifer Steinkamp. She will be launching a new business called Goldeen, Services in the Fine Arts, to advise collectors, artists, corporations, and institutions. The recent solo show of new work by Rachel Lachowicz at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica sold out for the most part in short order. Including a number of her signature works using make-up, the exhibition featured a large-scale, multi- colored sculptural wall relief homage to Donald Judd. Shoshana Wayne presently features a show entitled "Our Bodies Our Shelves" by New York artist Charles Long--a highly imaginative and articulate body of work. Some feminists protested the show's title-- a play on the title of the landmark feminist self-help book of the 1970s, Our Bodies Our Selves--charging that a white male has encroached upon exclusive territory of women's exploration. Long's art addresses the blurring of sexual identity within the core of the self and is sensitive and enlightening. Hey ladies, let's lighten up. Jane Hart is a director of Muse X Editions in L.A., a new contemporary art publishing firm specializing in digital technology.