HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ARTILLERY! 5 YEARS OLD! ANNIVERSARIES MARK cycles, patterns, reasons to keep going. If you make it one year, you might as well go another. All of a sudden, it's five years. Now you're committed. I could apply that logic to quitting smoking (which I...
Fashionably Macabre
Of course I knew of bad-boy provocateur Alexander McQueen’s reputation as a brilliant couturier, with words like “artist” used to describe him, but such hyperbole is thrown about willy-nilly in the fashion world, and I just assumed it was an exaggerated way of saying...
SOAP DISH
The mid-afternoon New York City traffic is uncharacteristically brisk on my way to interview performance artist Kalup Linzy. I arrive in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, half an hour early, with my photographer. Linzy greets us at his unmarked live-in work-space basement...
MILF AS MUSE
It is difficult to imagine John Currin’s work adorning walls more modest than those of the uptown Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan. Currin’s subjects have become progressively more well-heeled as his career has advanced. His signature subjects of yore—the ludicrously...
Mike Kelley at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills
You have to be ready for almost anything when you enter a Mike Kelley show: a more or less conventional gallery view of objects or documents; a maze, matrix or mosaic of seemingly found or reconfigured objects; or an immersive multi-media experience of sculptural...
GUEST LECTURE: Jim Shaw
I was working on these shaped canvases and sculptures that had printed blowups of appliances and added elements such as Expressionist drips, shirtless guys in pain, cartoon and Fauvist chickens, and cartoon elements. One was like a reduced scale version of the bone...
A Ketchuppy Good Time
I was urged electronically to go see Dutch theater company Wunderbaum on its last night in LA at the REDCAT with no details other than superlatives (which, however, managed to get a bunch of us on that contact list out). I knew it had something to do with LA artist...