Dear Readers,My mother always told me, “It’s a man’s world.” I vividly remember her saying that to me when I was crying in my bedroom after my boyfriend stood me up. Mom consoled me with those words, while patting my head and wiping away my tears. She also told me...
Tripping the Light Fantastic
James Welling’s “Flowers” (2004–11) suggest backlit tree branches in bloom against a blank sky. A pure white light appears to pass through these elegant arrangements of shadowy stem, leaf and petal shapes, and in the process is refracted, as if by a prism, into...
Super Inequality
Micol Hebron is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Through photographic works, videos, installations, performance and writing, she has become known for critically engaging the tropes of art history and modernism, with a particular eye toward resurfacing...
Field Report: Berlin
Painted on a small particle board, screwed to a brick wall, above and behind which Berlin’s U-Bahn (here elevated) rumbles to and from its terminus, a figure of indeterminate sex holds a power drill to its head, the bit twirling out the opposite temple in a splash of...
Notes from Underground
Summer of 1965. The artist’s mother, Resia (also an artist), stands between her two daughters wearing a sleeveless shift with a bold daisy pattern. The horizon line of the Atlantic connects the heads of the three women, who pose, smiling and relaxed, in front of a...
RETROSPECT: Lou Reed
I was sitting in my car when I heard that Lou Reed had died. The announcer went on to say that although Reed was not as famous as the Beatles or the Eagles, blah, blah—I almost rear end the car in front of me. Not as famous as the milquetoast-I-Wanna-Hold-Your-Hand...
México Inside Out
Surveying advanced art from Mexico City during the last quarter century, “México Inside Out: Themes in Art Since 1990” includes the work of 22 artists, mostly in their 30s and 40s, and one collective. The fact that several artists are not native Mexicans demonstrates...
Master of the Mexican Silver Screen
There’s a scene early on in the film The Night of the Iguana (1964) where Richard Burton, playing a jaded ex-priest-turned-tour-guide in Mexico, asks the bus driver to stop on a bridge. The passengers—a group of American matrons—are puzzled. “What are we stopping...
Legendary Provocateur
“Chris Burden: Extreme Measures,” at New York’s New Museum is the artist’s first major exhibition in the U.S. in over 25 years. A legendary provocateur, Burden has challenged traditional concepts of art through his galvanizing performance pieces and later...
UNDER THE RADAR
In 1968, Beatle Paul McCartney approached Richard Hamilton, inventor of Pop Art, to design the cover for the follow-up LP to the game-changing Sgt. Pepper album of the previous year. Hamilton came up with a typically droll and elegant solution by taking the opposite...
BUNKER VISION
With all of the recent excitement about the NSA it seemed like a good time to feature the work of The Surveillance Camera Players. Since 1996 this group has been staging plays for security cameras. Their productions have included Waiting for Godot, 1984 and Ubu Roi....
DECODER: The Bouncers Club
Talk about art critics in public enough and they’ll respond—they are, as a people, very fond of electronic communication. And, unlike the other online-overrepresented—unlike xbox fans or strident antiboob activists—what they have to say is always fresh and new...
MEDIA: Books
Forty years after his death, Henry Darger remains one of America’s most polarizing artists. Given that he died unknown and virtually friendless, it is a testament to the power of his work that people are still arguing over what it all means. The very reason we know he...
MEDIA: Books
“The basic premise of Learning from Las Vegas is that the car has significantly shaped the form of the contemporary American city.” This simple statement seems so manifestly obvious: both trivial and unassailable. Yet in the hands of Martino Stierli, it is embedded...
Opera for the Masses
There’s something suggestive of time travel as well as terrestrial travel in The Industry and LA Dance Project’s production of Christopher Cerrone’s Invisible Cities—adapted from Italo Calvino’s poetic masterpiece—as true to the spirit of Calvino’s work as almost...
TOTTENHAM CORNER
A racetrack is being demolished, and guess what, it’s not the Arcadian showpiece nestled beneath the San Gabriel mountains but the track of lakes, flowers and paranoia in the heart of Inglewood, City of Champions. In recent years this inner city workingman’s track has...
Jim Shaw
Any time an artist can invoke Michelangelo and Steve Ditko in the same work, he deserves considerable respect. At least that is the feeling one gets from the impressive show of work by Jim Shaw recently on view at Blum & Poe. As expected, Shaw’s work is erudite...
Karen Carson
Karen Carson has a tremendous sense of humor, as is evidenced in her most recent exhibition at Rosamund Felsen. Having chosen farming equipment—most prominently, tractors—as her subject matter, Carson revels in the sheer monumentality and vibrant colors of these...