It says something that you need not one, but two actors to play Norman Mailer in a performance that places him at the center of a cultural moment he could hardly have held without the connivance of a media machinery he had masterfully charmed and manipulated for...
LOOK FOR SPECIAL EDITION POSTCARDS BY SUSAN SILTON INSIDE OUR MARCH/APRIL 2017 ISSUE Susan Silton, Delivery Systems, 2017 A special edition for Artillery consisting of eight inserted postcards addressed to current U.S. Supreme Court Justices. Los Angeles–based...
Melbourne street artist Ms Saffaa painted and wheat-postered a wall with a Muslim feminist protest mural. The collage of Saudi artists and activists shared the space with pink Arabic reading: “radical Muslim.” It took over 80 hours to complete—and one night for...
When I first saw a reproduction of The Bedroom I thought, Oh my God, this guy has so few clothes. Later I altered my assessment of the painting and thought how cool to cut out all the crap in your life and just have a few necessities so you could concentrate on what’s...
Trying to actually define The Situationists is a slippery business. The more people who weigh in on what they were about, the more confusing it becomes. As an official art movement, Situationism existed from 1957 to 1972. They are considered a missing link between...
SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO Dear Babs, I’m thinking about leaving the U.S. and moving to Berlin because this country is about to explode and also because everyone says Berlin is better for artists. Is this true? How would I go about making this move? —Thomas Newton,...
Revolution in the Making “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity ...” Charles Dickens was writing about London and Paris before and...
Danielle Brazell is the general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, appointed by Mayor Eric Garcetti in 2014. Today the DCA has a budget of $42 million with 64 fulltime staff, a municipal art gallery (LAMAG) and 18 community art centers. Through...
Tony Conrad is one of the unlikeliest figures to be the subject of the kind of late-career historical recontextualization that authenticity-starved hipster youth have made their simulacral avant-garde. Don’t get me wrong. His bona fides are all in place; a pivotal...
The Los Angeles Opera’s co-production of Mozart’s The Abduction From the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail), which closed February 19th, updated the action of this singspiel from its original mid- to late-18th century Ottoman Turkish setting, when the Ottoman...
They gaze at us with supreme confidence. They are gods after all, aren’t they? Or leaders certainly – leaders of men. That is to say, soldiers – and they are all men, though anatomical details beyond the head are concealed beneath those often strikingly well-tailored...
In a post-truth world, what are the value of words? Intuition beats brags of sexual assault. 140-character tweets trump columns of The New York Times reporting. It was something evident at the first debate, prefigured by Fox News pundits, and understood by every...
Since 1933, the 6th Street Bridge stood as the iconic landmark that connected Boyle Heights to downtown Los Angeles. In 2015, the official proclamation of its imminent demolition provided an opportunity for me to direct Virtual Vérité in a series of ephemeral...
I first became aware of the remarkable documentarian Adam Curtis a few years ago, when I stumbled across The Century of the Self, a four-part television program exploring the birth of the public relations industry by way of the career of Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward...
“Scientists are saying that the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted.” So says Krysta Now in the underrated film Southland Tales. It’s hard to imagine that film getting made for theatrical distribution today. On the other hand, it...
HOW MANY TIMES? PAINTING IS NOT DEADDear Babs, I've been noticing more and more galleries focusing on figurative paintings. As a painter myself who has found the recent years difficult with the popularity of new mediums including photography, do you think there is a...
HELP SAVE SANTA FE ART COLONYThe Santa Fe Art Colony Tenants—some 80 working artists —recently had a close call. Theirs is the only rent-restricted artists’ live/work community in Los Angeles, and the clock was ticking down on their 30-year agreement with the...
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