Articles
Death and Glory
I visited the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens while its current exhibition, “A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning, and Memory in the American Civil War,” was being installed. I’d be tempted to call the Huntington a “peculiar...
All over the map
Early in her career, Joyce Kozloff gained prominence on both coasts. Here in Los Angeles, as one of the organizers of the 1971 protest of LACMA’s white-male-dominated exhibition record, she became an early proponent of feminist art. Four years later, she joined Miriam...
Seeing The Big Picture
Stanley Kubrick’s filmmaking career begins and ends in a mood of urban claustrophobia—at its earliest stages, gritty and almost inarticulate, yet full of expression; at the end, almost hyper-articulate yet inchoate; refined, even rarefied, yet darkly, mortally carnal,...
DON’T TOUCH ME THERE
Love, longing and performance art are best experienced in their natural habitats of dark venues on the edges of civilization. “UNTOUCHABLE,” curated by Italian performance artist Franko B, proved just that in November at The Flying Dutchman pub in Camberwell, London...
Marfa Girl
For a man who had just won the grand prize at the Rome film festival last month, Larry Clark was in a cranky mood. As he took to the stage to receive the Best Film award for Marfa Girl, his acceptance speech veered into a rant: “I’ve been fucked by everybody in...
The Low Road
The downtown art scene in New York City has a long and illustrious history that can hardly be contained in any one exhibition. Yet the New Museum’s “Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery 1969–1989” makes it possible to say a great many things. Organized by Ethan Swan,...
Mark Wallinger
YOU CAN TELL A GOOD DEAL ABOUT AN ARTIST FROM his studio. After I arrive at Mark Wallinger's, in the buzzing heart of London's Soho district, he pops out to buy a couple of cappuccinos before we settle down to do the interview, giving me a chance to nose around. His...
Gallery Girls
IF ANY OUTLIER SLEEPER CELLS OF AL QAEDA need further evidential motivation to make another terrorist strike against the decadent West, they need look no further than Bravo's new so-called reality series Gallery Girls. In a desperate ploy to further capitalize on the...
CINDY SHERMAN AND LEE MILLER
NARCISSISM MAY BE AT THE CORE OF SOME ARTISTIC PRACTICE, but rarely is it flaunted so grandly as in the work of Cindy Sherman. She has denied that her photographs are self-portraiture, but despite her assumption of various guises—sometimes so laden with prosthetics...
LAURA LONDON
Laura London often channels celebrities through her photography, but not necessarily in ways that you’d expect. She doesn’t document musicians, models or actors onstage or off, or portray them in surreal situations like say, Annie Liebovitz does. Instead, she asks...
THE POETS HOUSE
A quivering grid of afternoon sunlight shifts across the polished hardwood floor of a long narrow room. But for the drowsy hum of the air conditioner, all is silence and stillness, an ambience ideally conducive to the reception and refinement of clear thought....
Prizes and Politics
Nights CAN BE long in Moscow. But come spring, as the light fades ever more slowly, the evenings get off to a late start. Which may be why I inadvertently kept a driver waiting on the evening of April 3rd to ferry me and another journalist to the sprawling Artplay...
Nothing to Buy Documenta 13
More than 30 venues—166 international artists within a few square miles—a forum for ideas rather than conspicuous consumption: it’s Documenta 13! Held every five years in Kassel, Germany, and founded in 1955 by Arnold Bode, an art professor and designer from Kassel,...
THE ROAD TO DOCUMENTA
I’ve been warned that Llyn Foulkes is preparing furiously for “Documenta 13” and as I get in touch to arrange a meeting, I’m wary, in part, due to his reputation for fractious soliloquies regarding fellow artists, critics, art magazines, and in general, the art world...
MIKE KELLEY: STRAIGHT OUTTA DETROIT
EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT! ART STAR STOPS MAKING ART! That was going to be my headline after hearing the remark Mike Kelley made at the close of our interview. I was wrapping up our conversation, all ready to ask the final question, like Barbara Walters: "What's...
SOAP DISH
The mid-afternoon New York City traffic is uncharacteristically brisk on my way to interview performance artist Kalup Linzy. I arrive in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, half an hour early, with my photographer. Linzy greets us at his unmarked live-in work-space basement...
MILF AS MUSE
It is difficult to imagine John Currin’s work adorning walls more modest than those of the uptown Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan. Currin’s subjects have become progressively more well-heeled as his career has advanced. His signature subjects of yore—the ludicrously...
A Ketchuppy Good Time
I was urged electronically to go see Dutch theater company Wunderbaum on its last night in LA at the REDCAT with no details other than superlatives (which, however, managed to get a bunch of us on that contact list out). I knew it had something to do with LA artist...
Burning Man of Love
Though the annual festival known as Burning Man has received the occasional serious sniff from the art world, my overall anecdotal accounting of the festival rep in what one might call the high-end international art world has been one of mild disgust and pity. In...
Postconceptual GODFATHER
"What's with the God look?” I had thought to ask him at one point over the course of a rambling interview conducted in the lead-up to LACMA’s opening of his retrospective—provocatively, ironically titled, “Pure Beauty.” A slightly exaggerated (to say nothing of...