Breathless is not always an indication of on-coming medical crisis or pathology. Events (including cultural events) can stop us short or knock the wind out of us. And although the experience may be more common at live music events, it happens in galleries and museums,...
“Pictures Girls Make”: Portraitures — curated by Alison M. Gingeras — Blum & Poe The pictures people make of their lives
Portraiture has been a constant in art-making since the waning Middle Ages, and really since art first appeared (though they wouldn’t have called it that), which may extend back into prehistory. I would further conjecture that such early art itself encompassed a kind...
HAND HOLDING SCRIBBLE Karl Haendel at Vielmetter Los Angeles
At least once a week something happens to save my life. Usually it has something to do with some scientific discovery or biotech breakthrough that has managed to save, preserve or forestall further damage to some part of the biosphere. Or some reminder that nature...
Virginia Katz:Spent Lights and Passing Skies Long Beach Museum of Art
“Where the spent lights quiver and gleam, . . .” Matthew Arnold, “The Foresaken Merman” “ . . . — you can see / the whole sky pass through this head of mine, the...
Meta-Barbie Waking Up After Greta Gerwig's Midsummer Night's Dream
"I just don't know what to do with myself...." Burt Bacharach / Hal David, 1962 I’m not sure if Barbie is a new kind of cinema, but it’s not the sort of film we’re accustomed to seeing in wide theatrical release on the biggest screens and dressed in the highest of...
Martha Alf — A comic/cosmic phenomenology Martha Alf: Opposites and Contradictions — Michael Kohn Gallery
I came to this show of Martha Alf’s work as a novice. (I mean that almost reverentially—it’s the sort of work that sends me back to a kind of intellectual nunnery where I feel compelled to repent my inattention and failure to carefully and precisely observe.) Alf’s...
Glenda Jackson (1936-2023) Revealing Character and Defining a Moment
It is one of the great regrets of my life to have never seen Glenda Jackson perform live on stage—and there was at least one serious opportunity that somehow (almost inexplicably) passed me by—in a play I loved, directed by the playwright himself. The play was Edward...
Vaginal Davis — Her Private Dancers Vaginal Davis — Macha Family Romance - Marc Selwyn Fine Art
There are two fantastic shows up right now at Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Beverly Hills—both devoted to artists who have some claim to the term, legend—not as an honorific exactly, but simply in terms of the way they have lived their lives—bringing the full scope of their...
Framing “Monica” Andrea Pallaoro’s (and Trace Lysette’s) brilliantly 'unfinished' film portrait
Monica may be one of the sparest scripts I have ever seen put to film. The story itself is scarcely more than a classic trope whittled down to its most slender thread—the nostalgia/anti-nostalgia tale filtered through a very specific lens of estrangement. It’s a...
Zak Smith and Making Art for A World That Is Falling Down An Unburnt Witch: Zak Smith Drawings — Torrance Art Museum - March 25, - May 6, 2023
Full disclosure up-front: I am well-acquainted with Zak Smith as an artist. Before we met (in 2010), I was aware of his work only because of his inclusion in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and not incidentally because his work for that show had (what was for me) an...
Frieze LA 2023 — Flipping through my look book This merry-go-round shows no sign of slowing down.
Let me start by just getting a few things off my 28AA chest. I didn’t make it to ANY of the satellite Frieze Projects and am particularly upset about missing at least two of them—specifically Kelly Akashi’s project, Heirloom at the Villa Aurora (last week’s Pick of...
Yuja Wang, Gustavo Dudamel, the L.A. Phil — and Rachmaninoff We Came to Dance
‘People are talking about….’ is the way Vogue used to frame it from the old Diana Vreeland/Leo Lerman days until well into this century. And people have been talking about Yuja Wang’s Rachmaninoff cycle since her marathon performance at Carnegie Hall less than two...
Pussy Riot at Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles: Putin’s Ashes Neutralizing the political and cultural toxins of patriarchy
"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned...." W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming Since its inception, Pussy Riot (Nadya Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, et al.) made the balaclava a trademark, but I...
The L.A. Phil’s Tristan Project Long Day’s Journey Into Night by way of earth, water, fire, air, and the human element
We revisit the canonical operatic repertoire for many reasons. And—notions of gesamtkunstwerk to one side—it’s really no different with the Wagnerian repertoire. You could almost attach that description to operas dating from the Baroque. (One might easily make a...
Robert Berman has a world to sell to you. Santa Monica Auctions' ongoing reinvention
Robert Berman has always understood one essential factor driving the art market—and especially the auction market: the passion of collectors. To hear him tell it, you might think it was his own collector’s passion more than anything else that pushed him into the art...
Adam Greener — Spiraling Out of Bounds
You don’t need a DSM to figure Adam Greener out, but it can’t hurt. Not to worry—he’s not quite there yet, though there are indications that as post-pubescent hormones flood his bloodstream, he’ll be on his way in no time. Adam is an American student aged about 10...
Soft Machinery and Melting Monuments: Getting A Handle on Claes Oldenburg
My early impressions of Claes Oldenburg and his work were shaped largely by mass media. I tended to think of his work in association with Pop artists like Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Rosenquist—though also artists like Allan Kaprow and to a lesser extent, George...
“To Hell With Love” The assault on Democracy, Women, and the conversation we make around them
These notes are for Dave Hickey, Paula Rego, and Annie Ross. "Let me be clear about this: I don't have a drug problem, I have a police problem." Keith Richards — flyleaf quotation for Dave Hickey's Air Guitar Just a moment...