Every once in a while (on those rare occasions when we’re away from our favorite gun clubs, firing ranges and ammunition shops), I’ll run into one of our ARTILLERY family and friends and s/he’ll ask me what I’ve been up to. It can be awkward—especially if I’ve just...
Jason Yates is preternaturally disposed to emulate, extrapolate and thoroughly and passionately investigate anything that relates to pop culture, therein creating his newest foray into the simultaneous realms of sculpture, paintings, installation and collage at C....
Time was running out for me and I had to experience some of the goggle hype at the New Frontier installation space. It’s a kind of expanded cinema meets art, meets doc, meets VR, meets Connect sort of space. A person could really spend three full days experiencing the...
Poet Wallace Stevens, in his seminal poem “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction,” eschews a literal interpretation of anything, vying instead for a Greenbergian-like approach to art, indeed to life itself, privileging purity in abstraction over narrative. This recent...
I’m unclear what happened next but I do know after not getting into some parties (BET) and getting into others we ended up at the Celebration of Music in Film, highlighting the festival’s opening night film What Happened, Miss Simone? Performing at the event was...
There’s always a bit of suspense walking into an exhibition of Anish Kapoor’s work. At this point in the artist’s career, we may have certain expectations about what we will see, which are not infrequently satisfied (i.e., brilliantly finished, reflective surfaces,...
As I may have mentioned before, collage—in spite of lip service to artists from Picasso/Braque to Hannah Hoch to Rauschenberg to Elliott Hundley—remains under-acknowledged as the central formal and conceptual engine of modernist and postmodern art over the last 100...
We all know about the parasitic commerciality at Sundance. The festival desperately clinging to their long forgotten outsider status: the overpriced condos, the jello shot luge, the metal business cards and models that have lost their shoes. We’ve all heard the story...
Offering a more complete picture of the artist than the one beloved in popular imagination, “Keith Haring: The Political Line,” at the de Young in San Francisco illuminates a more radical and shamanistic side that seems to be fuel and lifeblood for the playful and...
There may have been a ‘great thing’ or two (literally) amongst the millions of pages on display at the Geffen; but good luck finding them. I shouldn’t have to be telling this to Printed Matter (a fabulous art book store that’s a must whenever I’m in Chelsea)—but when...
I sometimes wonder what the point of an art fair is anymore. I mean, isn’t that why we ‘let our fingers do the walking’ through Artforum every month? When I expressed this thought on a recent FB post, one of my pals (a well-known artist) rejoined that a “great...
First of all, soda and gardeners don’t usually go together; that’s not to say that all gardeners must abstain from soda or that soda doesn’t sometimes yearn for the garden, but it’s an unlikely alliance, yet Jason McLean’s exhibition at Wilding Cran is a playful and...
It’s a commonplace of urban life that certain social or cultural venues exert disproportionate influence simply because of their size and leverage in the community. It’s no different in the L.A. art world, where certain galleries and museums compel our attention...
Like many other American citizens, I listened to President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday evening. Full disclosure: I was an early supporter of the President in his first election campaign—but, as I’ve stated on the record, I live in a state of deep...
Monique Prieto’s newest exhibition aptly titled Hat Dance, on view at the brand new LAM Gallery on Highland Avenue, charts like the banned Mexican dance it was named for: a kind of radiant courtship between the artist and the painting, and further still between the...
It’s been said that The Marriage of Figaro (or, more precisely, The Mad Day, or The Marriage of Figaro, as it was originally titled) was one of the first nails in the coffin of the ancien régime. Its author, the playwright, musician, watch-maker (and inventor),...
I was generally sympathetic to the examination of remote machinic vision on display at XPO Gallery, with their presentation of a Brooklyn-heavy group show that is weirdly shut to the public: HIKE, HACK, HIC et NUNC. Interestingly, it coincided with the punch of...
The opening night of the LA Art Show offered the usual enticements—free food and drink, opportunities for schmoozing and networking, celebrity-gawking—but it also happened to have a great deal of impressive contemporary art on display. Here, in no especial order, are...
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