Artillery catches up with GWAR for their sprawling retrospective at Beyond the Streets. ARTILLERY: Some of GWAR’s songs are actually good—if you’re into thrash. Does it ever bother you that this sometimes gets lost in the focus on GWAR’s wild stage shows? BLOTHAR: Don’t seem so surprised that we write good music! After forty years, we should have learned something. Honestly, it doesn’t bother us...
On a quiet, hilly residential street in Echo Park, behind an unassuming fence, there is a cathedral to freewheeling sexuality, a place where art and sex mingle to such an extent it can be hard to tell the difference. Most Angelenos will be familiar with the Tom of Finland House, the charming 1912 gabled Craftsman where artist Touko Laaksonen drew thousands of horny pictures of cartoonishly sexy...
With one notable exception, the original cast of This Is Spinal Tap were wildly successful thespians playing complete fuckups. Arguably the most iconic character of the lot, the exploding drummer “played” by everyman Ric Parnell, was another story altogether. The tall, angular skin pounder shown pondering the fate of his predecessors—while lounging in a bubble bath with a shower cap on his...
I’m not sure exactly when I accepted that the future of contemporary art belongs to the furries. It likely happened at the waterfront rave in Pittsburgh—where, flanked by gyrating, half-clad wolves and sexy tigers—I spent the late hours of July 4th lounging with a collective of anthropomorphic artists, dangling our legs over the dark waters of the Allegheny River and talking big ideas, until we...
For decades, art and fashion have occupied parallel but distinct tracks. There have been moments of convergence—think Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus ballet costumes, Salvador Dalí’s sartorial collaborations with Elsa Schiaparelli, and Keith Haring’s “Pop Shop”—but the art world generally likes to consider itself above the fickle trends and blatant commercialism of fashion, while fashion, even at its...
We asked 12 artists to show us their shoes...
The first thing that catches my eye upon walking into the Von Lintel Gallery for an exhibition of photographs from Chloe Sherman’s renowned 1990s series “Renegades” is a large black-and-white print (17.3 × 24 in.) of a half-dozen young women, perhaps in their early twenties, lined up at the counter of a coffee bar, butch-femme-styled in casually improvised variations inspired by everything from...
Summer is museum season. I’m writing this in early August, a month during which the Angeleno art viewer’s options are fairly clear: Sweat it out on Melrose in pursuit of every lackluster group show; escape to the beach, like the dealers who phoned in those group shows from the shores of the Adriatic (I prefer the South Bay); or spend the day at MOCA, where admission is free and the air is a...
Remember I had a plan to discuss overused and oversimplified terms in a way that anyone can understand? In an accessible, user-friendly but without being patronizing manner. Well fuck that. I quote NWA: “Fuck crossing over to them; let them cross over to us.” And to that end, I beseech you to remember how powerful words can be. How much we can achieve with a well-placed comma, and how many...
Deep in the Los Feliz hills of a more verdant Los Angeles, during the Civil Rights movement, Corita Kent spread messages of joy and feminine power through her art. “Corita,” as she became known, is widely known for her colorful serigraph prints which called for love...
If you’re reading this, it’s too late. Summer came and went. Pool parties in the Valley? Over. Midnight drives on Mulholland? Gone. We don’t care that you went to Sicily, that your credit score’s crippled because of it, or that you haven’t k-holed at Marcelino’s since...
For those familiar with the late painter Noah Davis and the lasting influence of his Underground Museum—the Arlington Heights exhibition space he operated with his wife and collaborator, Karon Davis—the Hammer Museum’s eponymously titled retrospective survey of the...
Navigating the tension between impulsive expression and mastery of one’s craft is a fundamental aspect of the artist’s journey. A similar tension underscores the construction of personal identity that defines adolescence, and hence, the Orange County Museum of Art’s...
In her 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin reimagines human history not as a tale of conquest, but as one of containment. She proposes that the first human tool was not a spear, but a vessel—a bag, a bowl, a bottle. If stories are “carrier...
Once, when I was 12 or 13, I was looking at Fernand Léger’s 1925 painting Composition in the European wing of LACMA’s since-demolished Ahmanson Building when I noticed a small termite crawling across the surface. Slightly alarmed, I notified an elderly gallery...
The news of BLUM’s abrupt closure after 30 years in Los Angeles reframed the landmark gallery’s final exhibition, Wilhelm Sasnal’s “AAAsphalt,” into an inadvertent elegy for contemporary art in Los Angeles. Entering the massive complex on an early July afternoon, I...
The night I saw Kaoru Ueda’s self-titled show at Nonaka-Hill, I found myself later at a friend’s house watching YouTube videos of marine life. The viewing experience of the vibrating patterned creatures felt nearly identical to Ueda’s obsessively precise paintings of...
To read a novel is to play detective. The detective novel leverages this symmetry: the reader identifies with Sherlock Holmes’s or Philip Marlowe’s driving curiosity. Our favorite sleuths want to get to the heart of the crime; we want to get to the end of the story....