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There’s a scene in Paul Greengrass’s 2007 film The Bourne Ultimatum when former CIA operative Jason Bourne/Matt Damon kills a Moroccan man named “Desh” using a book, what appear to be shampoo bottles, and a towel. The death match goes down in a Tangier apartment, and...
Can art hurt people? In mid-February, I sat in Boyle Heights’ El Tepeyac café across from a revolutionary named A. and probed him with questions in order to find out. A., a slim Latinx man wearing Elvis Costello glasses, belongs to the anti-gentrification group Defend...
Maybe every gesture that you make can birth a fresh way of living. Perhaps by merely looking over your shoulder, or touching the ground, you can create a brand new philosophy or a radical break with reality. So argued the dancers in the Trisha Brown Dance Company at...
Five years ago, San Francisco–based painter, sculptor and performance artist Ana Teresa Fernández woke from a long night’s sleep with a sudden inspiration: She would erase the border fence that divides the United States and Mexico. It was June, 2011. That October,...
“She’s famous for her use of negative space.” The security guard’s soft voice wafted over to me from the corner of the gallery. I stood in the white cathedral of LACMA’s Broad Contemporary building, narrowing my eyes at a huge expanse of what looked like nearly...
Los Angeles performance artist Molly Jo Shea knows that you’ve got some genuine feelings, you’re just scared to reveal them. If you attend one of her shows, maybe you should be afraid. Shea operates as a doula of the emotions and she will barf blood or take a tough...
Jibz Cameron, the performance artist and poet of female panic who goes by the moniker Dynasty Handbag, is trying to make more user-friendly work. Cameron has made her name by staging wild and incandescent actions that make you feel excitedly deranged. In her 2015 show...
Victorian critic Walter Pater’s famous maxim that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” admires the musician for her destruction of boundaries: “[Music’s] end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the...
In his Aesthetic Theory, philosopher Theodor W. Adorno wrote of art’s “double character,” that is, the idea that art flourishes when it resists society, and dies if it is swallowed by the capitalist hive-mind. “Art is the social antithesis to society, not directly...
In 1963, artist Allan Kaprow held a “Tree Happening” at George Segal’s New Jersey farm. Kaprow’s written instructions commanded a crowd holding tree saplings to venture into a field, which had been outfitted with poles bedazzled by tar-paper strips. A leader of these...
Agnes Martin, the great Abstract Expressionist painter (1912–2004), believed in cosmic connection. She labored over her famous grid paintings almost her entire professional life, except for a difficult break from 1968 until the early 1970s, and in them she strove to...
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