For the past few weeks, Iron Halo, a catalog of Sal Salandra’s art, has occupied my coffee table, stopping everyone who sees it in their tracks. The cover is a detail from a work called Human Ashtray: an ultramarine background surrounds a bearded man wearing a dog...
“Children know something that most people have forgotten.” —Keith Haring’s journal entry from July 7, 1986. In the spirit of Keith Haring’s retrospective, “Art Is For Everybody,” I decided to seek a child’s perspective on his work, enlisting my friend’s eight-year-old...
In 2017, my friend—artist/curator Nancy Baker Cahill—invited me to see the art she was creating using virtual reality technology. Until that point, I knew Nancy to make ambitious drawings and otherworldly videos depicting abject, flesh-like topologies; works...
As any Angeleno knows, every awards season, from about September - February Hollywood studios buy up billboards to promote their films as award-worthy works of art; it’s like LA’s version of leaves changing color in Fall. Unlike normal ads for new releases, each of...
In the midst of the Revolution of 1917, fiery Bolshevik Leon Trotsky warned members of the Menshevik party that their moderate methods in the revolutionary world would relegate them to history’s “dustbin.” In an ironic appropriation six decades later, Ronald Reagan...
I’ve been thinking about the concept of damnatio memoriae recently. Translated as “condemnation of memory,” the term refers to a practice associated with ancient rulers who called for the erasure of their predecessors from the historical record; their likeness removed...
I Am Shelley DuVall frames the inimitable ‘80s actress as a queer icon, whose tragic life and captivating personality has always vacillated between human and extraterrestrial planes. The exhibition functions as a hybridized gallery/clothing store that also raises...
Dear Reader, The inimitable philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote On The Concept of History in 1940 while fleeing the Nazi death machine and his words have never been more prescient: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we...
Imagine you check your mailbox to find a neatly folded copy of The New York Times waiting for you, its headline reading, “Herr Hitler’s Nazis Hear an Echo of World Opinion.” Wait. What? A double-take ensues as you encounter Susan Silton’s most recent work of art. As...
After experiencing Frieze LA at Paramount Studios, I've got some super exciting ideas for everyone to consider and some fun activities you might want to do to make your experience even better than mine. I would have done the following, but I was there as a member of...
Adrian Piper’s retrospective was the largest solo show dedicated to a living American artist MoMA has ever produced, and though its Hammer iteration is a tad smaller, it’s no less of a triumph. A mixture of reams of text, performance, posters, newspaper ads, photos,...
Cannibalism is now a regular thing in the art world. I’m not being metaphorical by referring to the cutthroat competition of an art market mirroring the inhumanity of its elite clientele. I’m talking about actual artists eating people. In 1996 the artist Marco...
In his recent work, Jesse Benson uses appropriation to dismantle “appropriate” interpretation. But unlike other painters who might pursue this goal through dramatic, even offensive subject matter, Benson does something subtler, de-familiarizing recognizable, seemingly...
It’s worth considering why it’s so easy to caricature Donald Trump. He looks strange—with his fake tan, anus-like pout, signature comb-over—topped with a bright red, race-baiting ball cap. Like any President-to-be, he’s the focus of boundless criticism and ridicule,...
Youth is so overrated. Remember The New Museum’s “Younger Than Jesus” show in New York? It’s time to look to artists“Older Than Moses.” Here are some California artists past retirement age, but not retired.Judy Fiskin A 71-year-old LA native, Fiskin has an...
Curated by the New York-based art and fashion magazine collective DIS, The Ninth Berlin Biennale: “The Present in Drag” (or BB9), attempts to examine a “postcontemporary” condition through the presentation of unavoidable inauthenticity. Mostly it consists of work made...
Erwin Wurm’s "One Minute Sculptures" at The MAK Center is crammed with critically disruptive content, though at first glance there’s not much to look at. In a literalized enactment of the Duchampian observation that “the viewer completes the art,” visitors to Wurm’s...
Trying to communicate the plot of Matthew Barney’s recent, nearly six-hour opera, River of Fundament, makes me feel like the SNL character Stefon ...“The movie has everything: Fran Lebowitz, gold-leafed poop, Egyptian gods, Elaine Stritch, classic cars, Maggie...
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