I will not lie, Jim Hodges is one of my favorite artists, and the reasons why are innumerable. Like the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote, allow me to “count the ways.” His recent retrospective at the Hammer Museum, entitled "Give More Than You Take"...
LOOKING A GIFT HORSE IN THE MOUTH
“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” Don Vito Corleone to Johnny Fontane, The Godfather (Paramount, 1972) written by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, from the novel by Mario Puzo, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. As visitors to this blog are aware,...
Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin
Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch seem to have channeled the Bauhaus’ Oskar Schlemmer—not an easy task, but one certainly worth considering. Working in the vein of sculptural theater, Fitch and Trecartin have created a strangely alluring alternate universe using “a...
“Racial Imaginary” at Pitzer College
Pitzer College's exhibition, "Racial Imaginary," the visual art component of a larger project that includes a book of essays, musings and poems, demonstrates the fecundity of race and identity for artists of all media and aesthetic proclivities. The featured artists...
Carole Bayer Sager at William Turner Gallery
"New Works: Paintings by Carole Bayer Sager at William Turner Gallery, September 18, 2014" From Carole Bayer Sager at William Turner Gall. Posted by Artillery Magazine on 11/17/2014 (13 items) Carole Bayer Sager New Works Katherine Ross and Michael Govan attend as the...
Blur and conquer: How Hello Kitty made pets of us all
In case you didn’t notice, Hello Kitty invaded Los Angeles last month. If you were anywhere near Little Tokyo, you could scarcely escape the impression that not only that neighborhood, but half the population of this side of Los Angeles had been initiated into the...
Hurricane Blues
During the summer of 2012, artists Eddie Rehm and Kenneth Ian Husband were enjoying something of a personal Golden Age in their tiny shared studio in Patchogue, a working class town on Long Island, New York. The studio itself was little more than a shed in the yard of...
Robert Olson
Robert Olson was a colleague and fellow art world traveler. From the beginning his work was marked with a deep sense of isolation, and it this deeply private motivation that suffuses his retrospective at the Luckman Art Center. Spanning a twenty-year period, the show...
I’m A Stranger Here Myself: Soundtracks for scary screens and scarred landscapes
The center of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Friday evening program was a shimmering pulsation of musical color, both harmonic and timbral, in a field of black and white. Both Susan Graham’s rendering of a suite of Kurt Weill songs and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s own suite...
The Michelle Andrade Story of My Life
There was a moment between the late 1960s and early 1970s when mainstream American mass culture seemed to heave a collective sigh of relief. With the first major convulsions of the American civil rights movement and the trauma of recent political assassinations...
Protests at Guggenheim Over Labor Abuse
New York TimesA 40-foot banner was unfurled inside the central rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Wednesday evening.. . . READ MORE
About town: scanning the remnants [Thomas Eggerer, Kim Kei, Luke Diiorio]
We all know what brought us to Los Angeles; the question is what makes us stay. I hate driving; but the one good thing about being pulled occasionally off the beaten path (inevitably by car in L.A.) is the opportunity to see what has changed (disconcertingly,...
Editor’s Letter
Dear Readers,Yes, this is still Artillery. We’ve got a new look, but we’re still the same on the inside. We feel that our revamped design is more reflective of what we are all about and how we’ve evolved over the last eight years.We claim that we’re “The Only Art...
The Guerilla in the Room
From the beginning, the plans for the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art building have been a private collaboration between Director Michael Govan and the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. This latest chapter in the quest for a new building for the county museum began at a preview I attended in the LACMA auditorium for the exhibition The Presence of the Past on June 3, 2013. More than a preview, it was a show of its own for a project that had advanced without public review, all the way to finalizing the mass, the shape and the exterior circulation of an apparently unconventional new building.
Ry Rocklen’s Quotidian Bling
Ry Rocklen saved oyster shells, along with some rocks, then tried to unload them one day at a garage sale. “I didn’t sell a thing,“ he told me in an interview, about his boyhood collecting obsession. Decades later, he is still drawn to treasuring odd stuff: discarded...
Taisha Paggett Emphasizes Experience
Bodies are complicated. Choosing to work with the body as an artistic material complicates its complications. The resulting nest, where taisha paggett settles in to practice, can be thick and sticky. Paggett has grappled with the ways identity and environment are...
The Postconceptual Multimedia
Is fashion the medium of the moment? I’m not talking about haute couture or luxury ready-to-wear fashion design. Since the ascendance of Conceptualism, the means of fabrication have been more or less beside the point in fine art; and so it would be here. This isn’t...
Linda Vallejo Paints a New Color Scheme
“I’m a hypocrite,” Linda Vallejo says, referring to her latest series “Make ’Em All Mexican.” “I grew up on Fred Flintstone and Frank Sinatra. I’m all American.” She adds, “I think we are all hypocrites in one way or another. We all have our prejudices and judge each...