As I meandered through Marisol Rendón’s installation, “So, Dragons Do Exist?” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles gallery last summer (this was before I had even glanced at the contrarian, almost self-negating parenthetical subtitle, “Considerations of the Unavoidable...
[Orpheum Theatre, Los Angeles, February 24, 2013] ‘The best defense,’ as the old saying in legal and sporting circles goes, ‘is a good offense.’ John Waters, film director, artist, entertainer, theatrical impresario, and art connoisseur, goes better than that by...
So like a few of you (not many more—which was wise—you really didn’t miss anything), I went down to the Grand Central Market at 3rd and Broadway downtown to hear Dave Hickey plug his latest, Pirates and Farmers, subtitled “Essays on Taste,” under MOCA’s auspices—which...
There’s something suggestive of time travel as well as terrestrial travel in The Industry and LA Dance Project’s production of Christopher Cerrone’s Invisible Cities—adapted from Italo Calvino’s poetic masterpiece—as true to the spirit of Calvino’s work as almost...
It’s been a productive year for Farrah Karapetian, a participant in “The Black Mirror” group show at the Diane Rosenstein Gallery, L.A. Louver’s 2013 “Rogue Wave” survey, and the 2013 California-Pacific Triennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. She has also been...
The title of Iva Gueorguieva’s show “Spill/Frame” seemed almost a naked admission of its strategies and ambition with a concomitant risk of crashing, careening failure. In almost all of the works on view there was both a willful, self-imposed notion of the edge or,...
La Cienega Boulevard, as it traverses Beverly Hills, West Hollywood and Los Angeles, appears not to have changed much over the last few decades, until you hit Venice Boulevard. Trailing south into Culver City, the character of the boulevard shifts dramatically. What...
There are two clues Florian Morlat is up to something different with his show(s) at Cherry and Martin, which held court there for two months. With overlap between the shows, and some work reappearing in slightly different configurations, the second made clear a dry,...
Margie Schnibbe has a jungle thing going on in the front reception area of her house, as it seems to be filling with artsy-crafty sculptures made of stuffed pre-dyed and hand-painted fabrics. Some of them have a vaguely Nikki de Saint-Phalle aspect; others could only...
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...
THERE IS SOMETHING VERY REASSURING—;for someone whose attention, unless riveted by something truly compelling, tends to wander—about being told by her interviewee, "I pride myself on my short attention span." Chances are, though, Dawn Kasper's span of attention,...
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,...
“White Riot…be the beacon, be the light. KO’d by love” seduces with its elegance then simultaneously puts one off and seduces a second time with its literary and other cultural presumptions. Not pretensions: we can see that Capistran is intimate with these literary...
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...
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...
"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 article originally appeared in our November/December 2008 issue on Everyday Politics: In a text written for this show and displayed on one of the gallery walls, Kerry James Marshall says “I am working on paintings that address the theme of LOVE.” “Love” is...
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