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...
TRANSFORMATION CAN BE PERILOUS TERRITORY FOR AN ARTIST TO navigate, and to be authentic necessarily involves pain, either psychic or physical. Daniel Joseph Martinez' newest exhibition, the first in Los Angeles in five years, displays a fiercely compelling and...
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,...
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...
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...
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ARTILLERY! 5 YEARS OLD! ANNIVERSARIES MARK cycles, patterns, reasons to keep going. If you make it one year, you might as well go another. All of a sudden, it's five years. Now you're committed. I could apply that logic to quitting smoking (which I...
Of course I knew of bad-boy provocateur Alexander McQueen’s reputation as a brilliant couturier, with words like “artist” used to describe him, but such hyperbole is thrown about willy-nilly in the fashion world, and I just assumed it was an exaggerated way of saying...
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...
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...
You have to be ready for almost anything when you enter a Mike Kelley show: a more or less conventional gallery view of objects or documents; a maze, matrix or mosaic of seemingly found or reconfigured objects; or an immersive multi-media experience of sculptural...
I was working on these shaped canvases and sculptures that had printed blowups of appliances and added elements such as Expressionist drips, shirtless guys in pain, cartoon and Fauvist chickens, and cartoon elements. One was like a reduced scale version of the bone...
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...
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...
"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...
This interview took place December, 2009, at the restaurant in Los Feliz at Fred 62. Zak ordered the spaghetti. Find this article in our Jan/Feb 2010 issue; Artillery's first Biennial Sex Issue...(time for another!) https://artillerymag.com/product/janfeb-2010/ ...
IT'S true of the digital times that libido drives technology, but according to my friend Sergio Messina, porn is not only the engine of the Internet but the bona fide locus of art. And he's on a mission to prove it: "At the very least it's the perfect metaphor for the...
Mike Kelley and Michael Smith are iconoclasts who for years have challenged accepted conventions, creating artworks that provoke and titillate. Although friends since 1975, they have never collaborated before. “A Voyage of Growth and Discovery,” their first work...
It was two years ago when I first saw Susan Anderson’s photographs at an art fair in New York. They were images of little girls all dolled up, seemingly for one of those kiddie beauty pageants. I was struck by the pictures for several reasons: The photographs...
Subscribe to our weekly Gallery Rounds Newsletter for new Reviews, Art opps, Art Events, & More every week!