Catherine Opie enunciates the intentions and ideas behind her current body of 2012-2013 works with the first two images the viewer encounters—one a portrait, the other an abstracted landscape that could loosely be described as meditative. Lawrence (the conceptual...
Richard Jackson
Richard Jackson is a maniac with paint. His current retrospective is a testament to the gargantuan ambitions and massive amounts of energy he has displayed over a 40-plus-year career. The exhibition’s title, “Ain’t Painting a Pain,” is indicative of his commitment to...
Art Spiegelman
Fans of Art Spiegelman’s seminal graphic novel Maus can be forgiven for writing off Spiegelman as a one-hit wonder. After all, before producing the two volumes of the Holocaust memoir, which almost single-handedly turned the lowly comic book into a serious literary...
Kelly Barrie
Kelly Barrie’s hybrid process at first seems antithetical to photography and its ability to stop time, yet it is through his improvisations—like the nimbleness required by a skater or graffiti writer—that his work ingeniously engages a series of paradoxes. Rather than...
Charles H. Tatum
This 35-year retrospective, consisting of 52 sculptures (some presented in small editions) and nine digital photographs, offers a revealing cross section of Charles Tatum’s work dating from 1973 until 2008, the year the artist passed. Consistent throughout the...
JJ PEET
JJ PEET’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles is a well-installed show that offers a beguiling look at the New York-based artist’s practice. Three sculptural works from the “Floating Heads” series (2012-13) are sparingly placed in the darkened main gallery,...
Peter Soriano
Having redirected his energies over the course of 20 years, from cast-resin sculpture to wall-based works combining painting with steel cables and short lengths of pipe, Peter Soriano has lately dispensed with objects, working on the wall in spray paint and acrylic...
Althea Thauberger
Marat Sade Bohnice records the restaging of Peter Weiss’ 1963 play Marat/Sade. The play imagines that during the Marquis de Sade’s institutionalization in the Charenton Asylum in 1808, he wrote and directed a play about the death of Jean-Paul Marat, a radical during...
Featured Review: MexiCali Biennial 2013: Cannibalism in the New World
The moment the elevator of the Vincent Price Art Museum opens onto the second floor, one is immediately confronted with artist Matt MacFarland’s cartoon sandwich boards, part of a body of work called Steakation (2012). The nearest one depicts a heart-shaped steak with...
Duron Jackson
Duron Jackson gives us a key to decipher his Blackboard Paintings (2010-2012), the most compelling parts of his installation “Rumination,” the latest of the Brooklyn Museum’s “Raw/Cooked” series. The wall text is that key, informing us that the enigmatic glyphs are...
Bunker Vision
If I had to pick a filmmaker whose output might consistently be described by the term film-as-art it would be Jean-Luc Godard. Even in his 80s he is pushing the experimental window. When he was recently convinced to try something in 3D, he used cellphone cameras. He...
Retrospect
DONALD JUDD (1928–1994) What is this love of simplicity that gave us the great barren art form of Minimalism and its regressive culmination in the blankness of a simpleton? The real master it serves is industry because simple is just cheaper to make = a...
under the radar
Mike Ott’s Pearblossom Hwy reaches for reality, in a real way, sort of. LA filmmaker’s Mike Ott’s last movie–LiTTLEROCK (2010) was a surprise smash in indie terms, racking up the kewpie dolls at LA’s AFI Fest, indie fests in Boston, Reykjavik, and Montreal and the...
London Calling
It’s that time of year again. The clocks have gone back, the streets are strewn with fallen leaves and there is culture, culture everywhere. Not only is the London Film Festival in full swing but there is Frieze Art Fair—with ever more American and Asian galleries...
Death and Glory
I visited the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens while its current exhibition, “A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning, and Memory in the American Civil War,” was being installed. I’d be tempted to call the Huntington a “peculiar...
All over the map
Early in her career, Joyce Kozloff gained prominence on both coasts. Here in Los Angeles, as one of the organizers of the 1971 protest of LACMA’s white-male-dominated exhibition record, she became an early proponent of feminist art. Four years later, she joined Miriam...
Seeing The Big Picture
Stanley Kubrick’s filmmaking career begins and ends in a mood of urban claustrophobia—at its earliest stages, gritty and almost inarticulate, yet full of expression; at the end, almost hyper-articulate yet inchoate; refined, even rarefied, yet darkly, mortally carnal,...
DON’T TOUCH ME THERE
Love, longing and performance art are best experienced in their natural habitats of dark venues on the edges of civilization. “UNTOUCHABLE,” curated by Italian performance artist Franko B, proved just that in November at The Flying Dutchman pub in Camberwell, London...