In many ways, Monday evening’s “Un-Private Collection” panel/conversation at Disney Hall, featuring The Broad Museum’s principal architect, Elizabeth Diller, of the Diller, Scofidio + Renfro firm of architects, and moderated by the distinguished architecture critic,...
Cut Paper, Consuming Plastic; Cold Steel, Colder Flesh (2) – Cast A Cold Eye
It is that most fundamental of human needs – our need to make sense of things, to report, describe and explain the world; which itself may be at the core of our social and cultural needs, perhaps the basis of society and culture – the need to bring order to our lives...
Cut Paper, Consuming Plastic; Cold Steel, Colder Flesh (1)
The weather may be catastrophically portentous in Los Angeles; but, absent a 9 or 10 Richter scale earthquake or a tsunami that drags Santa Monica out into the Pacific, the show must go on (hey this used to be Hollywood). You may or may not be going out to see and...
Mélancolie to Exhilaration from Studio to Street
There was astonishing buzz around Philippe Quesne’s La Mélancolie des Dragons at REDCAT last Wednesday night; and as a sucker for avant-garde theatre, I simply had to be there, heat or no heat. I felt cooler just looking at the stage set, which resembled a forest...
The Center of the World is Where Your Work Happens –
The L.A. art industry never rests (as if awol ever needed proof of that!); but tradition dies hard, and art galleries and museums break out the new season alongside other arts and cultural venues. Matthew Barney had already screened his not-so-new (2014 – and six...
Ethereal Visions and Dangerous Liaisons: Adès and Cheng in concert at Zipper Hall
<p>For many of us in Los Angeles glued to a screen as a ferociously hot Tuesday afternoon faded with an exhausted sigh into a still intolerably warm Tuesday evening, possibly toggling between one task and another as <strong>Venus</strong>...
Exquisite Cadaver: Sundaram’s Couture of Surreal Salvage
The first encounter with the most strikingly original art (not unlike the most speculative scientific thinking) is always a bit strange – possibly configured, oriented or abstracted in a way toward which our minds and senses can only gradually accustom themselves. We...
A Sublime Moment on the Sixth Street Bridge
I’ve been trying to discourage art, cultural, political, fashion and retail organizations of every size from exhibiting, performing, organizing, opening, demonstrating or launching anything during the summer before Labor Day, and especially August. But I suppose it’s...
Mistaken Identities: What We Miss In Our Quest for the Next
It’s time for a little retrospect here at AWOL – as in looking back in an attempt to take in the whole of something. An impossible task – but you have to start somewhere. It’s also about taking the proper measure of something or someone you thought you knew –...
Refresh the screen: Anthony Caro at the Gagosian Gallery
File this under ‘better too late than never’ (i.e., of a piece with the story of my life). You have only two days to see this show; but if you’re in the Beverly Hills vicinity, I encourage you to run to it. This is a fabulous, albeit extremely compact, show in the...
Dancing In the Flames – Ruven Afanador at Fahey/Klein
Even under the crowded, frenzied conditions of a gallery opening, where you know collectors, other artists (and additionally, professional photographers in this instance), the usual Hollywood smattering of celebrities, supermodels and beautiful people, and die-hard...
Between Distance, Denial and Disappearance
It’s a commonplace of the current cultural moment that we have trouble tearing ourselves away from our screens. (Some of us anyway; and for some of us that screen is basically an extension of our desk.) But actually I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. ...
Girl/AWOL, Interrupted – the continuing controversies; the classics revisited (1)
We don’t call it ‘AWOL’ for nothing, you know. So while you (and my editors) were all HOWLing for my updates last week – and oh yes, we did have a few – the local art world news was eclipsed by the Los Angeles Review of Books’ publication of Joseph Giovannini’s...
Howl-ing Through the Years – Howl: A 60th Anniversary Celebration
I might have called it Sit Through This (which, I assure the reader, would have encompassed the best the show had to offer). The 60th Anniversary Celebration of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (not the 50th, mind you; the 50th + 10), took place last night at the fabulous Ace...
‘That Transparency Thing’ – Blob to Blot, Part II – A Debate Over the New LACMA
[Part I of this post appeared yesterday, following the preceding evening’s Third Los Angeles forum at Occidental College. I continue where I left off – as LACMA’s Director, Michael Govan left the stage to the evening’s host, the forum’s principal organizer, and Los...
From Blob to Blot – A Debate Over the New LACMA
And so the Govan/Zumthor/LACMA PR juggernaut thunders on, steamrolling over those skeptical eyes looking over their shoulders from near and far, critics and other local scolds (and possibly its immediate neighbors), to say nothing of its own Board of Trustees, the...
A Class of One: Me and Eloise
By the time I had discovered Eloise (there is only one, you know), I was already well on my way to becoming Eloise – if I wasn’t already. By that time, I had already begun moving away from children’s books and into actual literature. My older brother had already...