When looking at art one considers line, shape, volume, the play of light across pigment. When looking at Los Angeles, one considers other lines. The stark divide between the haves and have-nots is as tangible as the freeways that divide one neighborhood from another....
GUEST LECTURE
Marnie Weber is a Los Angeles multimedia artist who works in photography, sculpture, costume, film and performance. She is also the leader of Spirit Girls, an alt-rock music and performance group. Taken together, her work explores issues of gender and mysticism in...
SHOPTALK
SNEAK PEEKOpen House at The Broad on a Sunday AfternoonI was lucky enough to get in on the one-day preview of The Broad, the new museum in LA that will house the important contemporary art collection of power philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad. There was a viewing...
ART BRIEF
The Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills had its annual Oscar week art opening in February with an after-party for its top Los Angeles patrons at nearby Mr. Chow’s. The show this year was a selection of eye-popping oil paintings by John Currin depicting Rubensesque young...
LONDON CALLING
James Lingwood arrives at the Artangel office in a fluorescent yellow cycling jacket, having just ridden across London from another meeting. He looks like an accountant with his neat hair and glasses, though he studied history and art history at Oxford. His world...
UNDER THE RADAR
You wouldn’t know it from such thriving, vibrant publications as Artillery (can I get that raise now boss?) but print is a dying medium. Sure, they still run off enough copies of Divergent and Heaven is for Real to build a paper mache penitentiary the size of an...
RETROSPECT
It is depressing for me to think that most of my favorite art is a cold-hearted attempt at mind control. No, the Egyptians were not thinking only of beauty when they built the pyramids; they were thinking of death, and the power of intimidation. The little servant...
DECODER
In the middle of this issue where we talk all about the movers and the shakers, I think I should drop in a note saying that, in the end, it is all actually epically opaque.This one came from this obscure place, made a fortune in this impenetrable industry by moving...
BUNKER VISION
If anybody reading this is looking for a topic for an art book, I would like to suggest La Fura dels Baus. Although they are well known in Europe (they designed the opening ceremony for the Barcelona Olympics, and have had other pieces performed before audiences of...
ASK BABS
Dear Babs, I’ll be getting out of the Army soon and was thinking about going back to school for an MFA. If I don’t apply to a grad school in LA or New York, what should I be looking for in a school outside of those two areas? I’ve heard it’s an ideal way to make...
BOOKS
“And so it was I ate my pet [a rabbit] and remembered all of the fun times of summer. [. . .] That was the season when I realized that I must leave my loves behind.”Coming of age on the Norman coast and in the streets of Paris in the shadow of 1968: this delirious...
Kane’s World
Last December, with little fanfare, a major monograph celebrating the great postwar photographer Art Kane came into being. A 20-years-in-the-making labor of love for his son Jonathan, it presents, in one gorgeous volume, the first truly cumulative collection of Kane’s...
The Message
for Winfield Mowder and Gary MatsonThe third voice gave it away,the “just calm down” and make it believable voice,captured on the outgoing message.An unnecessary four-hour drive to San Francisco to see a doctor; death was already in the room.Winfield and Gary lived...
RECONNOITER
Francesco X. Siqueiros is an artist/printmaker, founder of El Nopal Press, publishing fine-art limited-edition prints since 1990 in downtown Los Angeles. The focus of El Nopal Press is to underscore the heterogeneous nature of culture and to acknowledge its borders...
“Alien She”
The Riot Grrrl movement, which emerged in reaction to the male-dominance and sexism that infused West Coast punk scenes in the 1990s, spawned a subcultural movement in art, publishing, and performance. Even in the resolutely anti-establishment punk rock scene, many...
Eric Wesley
Eric Wesley loves to kid around and unbalance the viewer. In this survey or rearrangement and reworking of objects from his production dating back a decade, he checks in with a wide variety of works distributed in a clock pattern throughout the spacious warehouse...
Leigh Salgado
Our clothes are, as Virginia Woolf reminds us, more than “vain trifles” serving “to merely keep us warm.” Instead, as Woolf asserts, “They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.” Art that turns our attention to our clothes illuminates how we see each...
Mernet Larsen
Born in 1940, Florida based painter Mernet Larsen exhibits a body of older as well as recent paintings in her Los Angeles debut. These moderate-sized canvases feature geometrically distorted figures that populate skewed interior and exterior spaces. After teaching...