Dear Readers, Suddenly, big is all around. Big, meaning huge spaces to create art in. Big, meaning large works to hang in gargantuan galleries. Big used to be considered vulgar but now it’s vogue. Big was garish, wasteful, decadent and dumb. Now it’s smart and...
Magic Carpet Ride
From the shaded parking lot, a stark beam of light shines through the loosely shut double doors of a nondescript white brick building. It is late morning, and the sun is already beginning to assert its presence as I approach the now-defunct Regen Projects gallery. It...
HOLLYWOOD IS THE SEXIEST
Since the 2012 opening of his eponymous Hollywood gallery, Perry Rubenstein has exerted considerable influence on the contemporary art world, while imbuing several exhibitions, such as his recent “The Humors,” with intellectual and symbolic perspectives that reference...
DESTINY TRUMPS DESTINATION
La Cienega Boulevard, as it traverses Beverly Hills, West Hollywood and Los Angeles, appears not to have changed much over the last few decades, until you hit Venice Boulevard. Trailing south into Culver City, the character of the boulevard shifts dramatically. What...
McCARTHY ROCOCO
It is tempting—though not entirely accurate—to report that this past spring and summer, Paul McCarthy’s new work made a big splash in new york. First we had “Paul McCarthy: Sculpture” at Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea: an exhibition noted for several large, complex,...
UNDER THE RADAR: WRITING Noise
The Los Angeles Free Music Society had its original heyday back in the 1970s, as much a dada and LSD-inspired piss-take on the high seriousness of experimental music—these were the days when Stockhausen was God—as a shaggy-dog extension of the Zappa/Beefheart/Wildman...
RECREATING RECREATION
while a long wait line at an LA museum is a rarity, here in New York you could easily pass an hour chatting in the line for the Met or MoMA or merge with the crowds in Chelsea. Late spring, the visceral experience of looking at art together with so many other curious...
STAGGERING WORKS: Beatriz da Costa
From the light, airy and playful feelings of the Laguna Art Musem’s “Faux Real” exhibition on the main floor, the atmosphere of “Ex·pose: Beatriz da Costa” shifts into dark, moving and intense as one descends into the museum’s dark basement. Da Costa’s “Dying for the...
SF Report: PERFORMANCE LAB
“And there it is...” Sage Charles smiled as he deftly inserted the business end of a baseball bat into the supine body of Ron Athey as part of the initial preparations for “Messianic Remains,” the latest installment in Athey’s “Incorruptible Flesh” performance series....
RETROSPECT
For me, Claude Monet stands between two of my favorite artists who played with the disintegration of the object rather than its creation: J.M.W. Turner and Anselm Kiefer. Turner’s objects sailed forth only to be obliterated by light as if they were Viking funeral...
London Calling: ALTERNATIVE GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSE
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else,” wrote Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities. In an “Alternative Guide to...
BUNKER VISION
In the late 1960s and into the ’70s an odd confluence of events made for some very curious cinema. Many stars that had become famous in the studio system were suddenly at loose ends to fend for themselves. At the same time, Hollywood was trying to get down with the...
The Road at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
""THE ROAD" JULY 13–AUGUST 17, 2013" From Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Posted by Artillery Magazine on 9/03/2013 (9 items) Aaron Wrinkle, Margaret Haines Lily Stockman Jonathan VanDyke Masood Kamandy, Brandon Andrew Chris Engham Molly Larkey Britton Tolliver John...
FILM: SECOND ACTS
While sagas of personal transformation are a staple of recent nonfiction filmmaking—from U.N. peacekeeper Roméo Dallaire’s inexorable drift into despair (and back) in the CBC’s Rwanda documentary Shake Hands With the Devil, to crack-mom Kirk White’s unexpected ascent...
FILM: In the Shadows, Cutie and the Boxer
Most stories about larger-than-life male artists and their girlfriends/wives share a familiar arc—he overshadows her. When Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner bought a house in East Hampton, Pollock got to work in the barn, Krasner painted in the bedroom. It was only...
Books: To (Richard) Hell and Back
Richard Hell swaggers up the side-walk, as if in a private movie that is being played out for the pleasure of others, as if he is being watched—which he is. Full of himself. Happy: yes, I suppose that’s another word for it. And why wouldn’t he be happy? He is about to...
ENCOUNTERS: HANS RICHTER
Some artists make Masterpieces. Others compile Oeuvres. Still others live Lives; if they (and we) are fortunate, those Lives are lived at the center of their times, or at least their times’ artistic practices. Like most Europeans of his time, the Berlin-born Hans...
Yvonne Venegas
Shot from behind a glass partition, a girl with long blond hair sits alone at the edge of an empty pool. Her back is to the camera; her legs create ripples in the blue water. Where the pool ends, a golf course begins. The setting is obviously one of wealth. This color...