With trunk tucked up compactly—the elephant’s signof defeat—he resisted, but is the child of reason now. His straight trunk seems to say: when what we hoped for came to nothing, we revived.—From “Elephants,” Marianne Moore Dick Blau uses his camera to map...
According to his Wikipedia entry, this is Michael Peppiatt’s eighth book about Francis Bacon. If all of his Bacon books were packaged like a deluxe DVD, this would be the really good feature length documentary about the “making of.” He certainly deserves to tell his...
Last year I was invited to view a controversial painting that the owner claimed to be a genuine Rothko he bought at a small LA auction many years ago. The painting was not officially included in the Rothko catalogue raisonné despite the fact that the owner discovered...
Archiving cultural ephemera is a tricky business. Anyone who’s followed my writing for even a brief time will have encountered some kind of rant about how the institutional canonization of cultural insurrections like Punk, zine culture, hippies, beats, etc.,—or...
Long films aren’t new. As early as 1914, there was a film (The Photo-Drama of Creation) that ran eight hours. Wikipedia lists at least five films from that decade, which ran at least six hours. In 1971 Jacques Rivette made a famous 13-hour film (Out: One) that had one...
The most famous Hollywood movie I appeared in was Roger Corman's Death Race 2000, which was bizarre because coming from New York, I didn’t know how to drive yet. Over the years the movie became one of the most popular American films in Europe, including France....
Looking like contorted urns collapsing inward or twisting outward, the 16 new cup-sized works that comprise “The Weight of Color,” Kathy Butterly’s fifth show with Shoshana Wayne Gallery, demonstrate her strength as an innovator. Working within the confines of a long...
In his essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” film theorist André Bazin observed that image-making was “no longer a question of survival after death, but of a larger concept, the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal...
The individual works in Devin Troy Strother’s 2010 solo debut were tiny spectacles, collages full of frolicking figures and bright shards of colored paper that extended beyond the confines of the frames. In his current exhibition “They Should’ve Never Given You Niggas...
ROCK AND ROLL IS FOR THE BIRDSDear Babs, What do you think about using live animals in an artwork? I recently went to a museum in Montreal and witnessed an entire exhibition of finches playing guitars! The air conditioning was blasting and I thought they needed little...
Humor is often a neglected muse in the production of fine art. Seldom is it thought of as a legitimate field of cultural inquiry or a productive platform for the creation of an aesthetic. Los Angeles-based mixed media artist Marc Horowitz, known for his socially...
DANGEROUS TERRITORYLOCAL HOMIES ANSWER MACCARONE GALLERYSometimes gentrification can backfire, especially if you crow about it too loudly. Last September New York gallerist Michele Maccarone told The New York Times that Boyle Heights, where she was opening her LA...
While it would not be incorrect to say that Kenton Parker’s work primarily deals with nature, it would be rather misleading. There are no polite painted landscapes or photographs of waterfalls or mountain ranges. Cement, cars and trash are just as common as flowers...
With 40 expressive oils, Victor Hugo Zayas’ exhibition “The River Paintings,” responds to the ebb and flow of the Los Angeles River in its many moods and manifestations, with each piece flowing naturally to the next. Created from 2013 to 2015, these huge paintings,...
Stephen Cohen is the founder of photo l.a. and the Stephen Cohen Gallery, which is now the Cohen Gallery on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles. In January the stalwart photo fair celebrates its 25th anniversary. Artillery: Why did you start photo l.a.? What made...
Playfully assaulting the construct of the rational, coherent, autonomous individual in his solo exhibition “You Have Nothing To Worry About,” Andy Fedak’s new stereoscopic (3D) film and virtual reality installation and three early “anxiety” videos explore his...
A recognizable figure or persona, which may or may not stand in for the artist but, regardless, bears on his relationship to the world and his painterly address of it, emerges in the Berlin-based painter Ulrich Wulff’s most recent show, “Preparations.” Call it the...
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