Many consider the AARON project the earliest use of AI in artwork. If AI is the most recent and advanced example of humans using automated processes to make art, then its history goes back much further. So why all the fuss now? Is AI so different than John Cage...
STAYING INSIDE THE LINES
HYPER-REAL HYBRIDIZATION Patricia Piccinini Finds Beauty in Otherness
Australian artist Patricia Piccinini’s world is inhabited by creatures that suggest genetic engineering gone awry or the infusion of sentience in hitherto inanimate objects. Her hyper-realistic sculptures combine elements of human form blended with those of animals,...
ABSTRACTION STUDIES George Legrady's Collaborations and Mythic Narratives
Generative AI image synthesis, exemplified by software like Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and similar tools, has captivated widespread attention enabling on-the-fly image creation through text prompts and image prompts. While either text or image quickly...
INFINITE VARIETY David Em Finds Endless Possibilities
Digital art pioneer David Em, whose work has been published and exhibited internationally, was the first to make images with pixels at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1975. He then went on to build articulated 3D creatures with mainframes at the company...
FURIOUSLY JUMPED UP Poor Things Delivers Visceral and Cerebral Thrills
"And when we know the world, the world is ours.” —Bella Baxter What is it exactly that makes a being human?” Is it the presence of a human body or a human mind? Or is it some incommensurable, uncanny union between the two? For the philosopher Descartes, the answer was...
BUNKER VISION I'm Sorry, Dave
The word “robot” first appeared in a Czech play by Karel Čapek from 1920 called R.U.R., to describe humans made of inferior materials that would function as unthinking and unfeeling slaves. The Czech word “robota” translates to “forced labor.” So began the uneasy...
ART BRIEF Gaga for AI
In the past year, galleries have opened shows displaying AI-generated art, so it was no surprise that one of the world’s top galleries, Gagosian, would host AI art shows in New York last year and in LA this January. Bennett Miller may have been an appropriate...
THE DIGITAL Technology is Their Beat
For your next fancy art after-party, I would recommend the following signature cocktail. While somewhat nontraditional and off-menu, this enchanted concoction is guaranteed to please and is crafted with a simple combination of ingredients: two parts childhood...
PEER REVIEW Sula Bermúdez-Silverman on Candice Lin
A sculptor and revisionist historian, Sula Bermúdez-Silverman uses a plethora of sculptural materials, from glass to ready-mades, to achieve her conceptual ends. The Los Angeles–based artist is known for her vibrant, sometimes eerie objects that conjure otherworldly...
SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS Welcome, Year of the Dragon
It’s the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese lunar calendar, which began February 10, and several museums are featuring Asian/Asian-American artists. Appropriately timed, or maybe just high time to feature them. For those who did not grow up Chinese, or are not Bruce...
OBITUARIES David Kunzle, Jay Willis and Margit Omar
Art historian and artist, curator and collector, gymnast, actor and activist David Kunzle, died January 1 at 87. Through his teaching at UCLA and his prodigious writings, the pioneer comicologist opened the doors of art history for the once-disdained topics of...
ASK BABS Welcome...Now Get Out!
Dear Babs, I was recently visiting some blue-chip galleries with my septuagenarian mother. After a few hours, she pointed out that not one gallery had a comfortable place to sit down and experience the art. She felt like it was an insult to anyone who isn’t a...
POEMS "What's Available for Happy Hour" and "Cowardly New World"
What's Available for Happy Hour? “Nothing, happy hour is from four till five.” “Really?” “It’s a literal hour.” “So, by extension all other hours are unhappy?” “Not necessarily. There are sad hours, bored hours, angry hours, even ecstatic hours, though some forms of...
COMICS Puppets on Strike!
PUBLISHER’S EYE: Izumi Kato Perrotin
This inaugural exhibition of Perrotin’s new LA space, as well as the artist’s first show in the city, features Kato’s recent paintings, drawings and sculptures of vibrant, mystical humanoid figures that he has become known for, some in the form of intimate wood...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Nery Gabriel Lemus Charlie James Gallery
There is something about watercolor that is intimate at any scale. The medium’s unforgiving nature sparks an urgency in its use, creating an immediacy in its organic textures, forcing the artist to build depth from layers and shallow pools that bounce the light around...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Paul Pfeiffer The Museum of Contemporary Art
“Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom” culminates in over thirty multimedia works of artist Paul Pfeiffer. The title of the exhibition references one of the works in the show which shows a video of director Cecil B. DeMille on loop exiting and...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Material Recovery Angel's Gate Cultural Center
"Material Recovery" combines printmaking with assemblage, collage and sculpture to illustrate the iconography of the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, along with images suggesting the waste left there by the shipping industry. The exhibition of 81 pieces by 31...