Articles
The Feminine Nonfigurative
“Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculptures by Women, 1947–2016” inaugurates the sprawling new complex recently opened by Hauser Wirth & Schimmel in downtown Los Angeles’ Arts District. Housed in a former flour mill that dates back to the late 19th century, the...
Astract Animation
Street photography is one of the great genres of modernist photography, peaking at mid-century with the work of Robert Frank, Gary Winogrand, Helen Levitt and others who used the camera to capture the strange little extemporaneous moments one experiences walking city...
No Chrismas at Ace
Even as the commercial side of the LA art world appears to be reaching historic heights, one of the titans of the local scene has been locked out of his expansive gallery and is being called to account for years of murky management.Doug Chrismas, the major-domo at Ace...
Craft Revolution
The Craft and Folk Art Museum—its unlikely frontage peering mischievously over Museum Row—has in the last few years come to the forefront of the LA art scene with its unpredictable exhibitions. Executive Director Suzanne Isken and her exhibition team (Holly Jerger,...
UNDER THE RADAR
The mighty Atlas Press—London-based purveyors of “pataphysical texts,” Dada documents, Viennese Aktionist manifestos, and Oulipo anthologies—has reissued a legendary art book that uses a tabletop cluttered with the detritus of daily life as a jumping-off point and...
Van Gogh
Notes from Basel
Art Basel is serious business, with some 280 galleries taking part—most of them on two floors of Building 2 at the Messeplatz, Basel's sprawling convention center. The action starts with two days of previews on Tuesday and Wednesday, before the fair opens up to the...
Queer Biennial II
With June welcoming gay pride across the country, what better time to display and celebrate the range of LGBTQ, here called “queer,” arts in one of the largest cities in the U.S., Los Angeles. “Queer Biennial II: Yooth: Loss and Found”—whose title plays on the...
Unlucky in Love
On different occasions I have been told that I am “cold,” “unemotional,” “apathetic” and other adjectives for not giving a shit. I reason that I was born with a hole in my heart or in my limbic system, remedying outbreaks of rogue feelings alone in the privacy of a...
Ai Weiwei
Artist Ai Weiwei takes himself down a notch before you can with the title of his Haines Gallery show, “Overrated.” The works are largely reiterations or extensions of previous work for which he is already world famous; works in which he subverts the authority of...
Laura London, Cole Case
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John Kilduff: Kilduff’s Cavern
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Diane Arbus
Audrey Wollen’s Feminist Instagram World
One of Los Angeles–based artist Audrey Wollen’s Instagram posts features an undated 1890s painting in which a nude woman reclines, examining herself in a mirror she is holding up to her face. Red beads are wrapped around the woman’s neck and ankle, bringing to mind...
Todd Gray’s Framing of Identity
“I’ve been going the wrong way for a long time … it’s sort of a reverse commute.” This is said by Todd Gray at the start of his 2010 performance, Caliban in the Mirror. This seemingly autobiographical, storytelling piece has Gray on stage with a few props—a camera, a...
The Science of Seeing
Two hundred years ago, the hierarchy of subjects taught to academic painters placed history and mythology at the top, with landscape and still life at the bottom. This ranking followed the scala naturae, the ladder or scale of nature derived from Plato: God, followed...
The Analog Revolution
The first to grow up in an image-centric world where the mass-dissemination of images via film, print and television started to infiltrate American culture on scales never before seen, those of the Pictures Generation found themselves grappling with notions concerning...
Amy Elkins’ Male Protagonists
Inside American prisons, thousands of men sequestered in tiny, dim rooms spend their lives waiting to die. Outside, this marginal population is hardly considered, except as a seamy abstraction. SoCal-based artist Amy Elkins finds inspiration in prisoners’ hermetic...
Lost At Sea
As soon as I entered the recent exhibition “Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), things took a turn for the worse. Or anyway, I did. Because it was the last day of the “New Photography” show that MoMA does every two years,...
Deep Dreams
Jeremy Couillard says that the pleasure of working with virtual reality (VR) is that he can move away from “a deceitful world I deeply wish did not exist. I need to create an alternative to that universe so I don’t go insane.” A video and installation artist, and...