Literati yet to meet Brittany Menjivar can now do so through her hardcopy publishing debut, a slender prose/poetry collection titled parasocialite. As a cheeky culture correspondent (a Salvadorian born in the DMV) and founder of Car Crash Collective (a late-night lit...
BOOK REVIEW: parasocialite
ENVIRONMENT MAKING Malaya Malandro on Collaboration
Created by Francis Kanai and Malaya Malandro, Everything Is a Self-Portrait is a collection of photographs and poetry produced from years of phone calls and emails between their respective homes in Japan and the US. More than a simple display of two artists’ works,...
BOOK REVIEW: Two Artists’ Books on Dystopia
The Earth is parched, its water impure. The air is poisonous, awash with industrial effluvia and alive with toxic organisms. Our culture has been radically and relentlessly artificialized, while we are regimented, consumerized, alienated and terrorized. Fortunately,...
Personal Spirituality Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues
The dolls we grew up playing with weren’t just dolls—they were alter egos, surrogate friends and family, and sometimes even symbolic forces of the universe. In this beautifully designed book, Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues, we get a chance to look at Saar’s special...
A Few of Jeffrey Vallance’s Favorite Things
Jeffrey Vallance holds a unique position in the LA art world. A contemporary of Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Jim Shaw, et al, his work has had a comparable impact locally and internationally, while not transitioning to the industrial fabrication mode demanded by the...
Book Review: A Measured Coolness Building + Becoming by Amir Zaki
Building + Becoming By Amir Zaki 272 pages X Artists' Books and DoppelHouse Press The works of Amir Zaki subtly subverts analog photography’s long-held truth claims. His photography, surveyed in the newly published artist book Building + Becoming, addresses the...
Book Review: Heartfelt Moments Portrait of an Artist by Hugo Huerta Marin
Portrait of an Artist By Hugo Huerta Marin 424 pages Prestel What exactly is a portrait? In art, “portrait” is generally understood to mean a visual likeness or representation. One could argue that a photographic portrait captures this visual likeness more closely...
Book Review: Dystopia Redux Brave New World: A Graphic Novel by Fred Fordham
Brave New World: A Graphic Novel Adapted and Illustrated by Fred Fordham 234 pages Harper Collins Original Text © 1932, 1946 by Aldous Huxley Oh wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world that has such people in’t!...
Book Review: Criminal Culture Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li
Portrait of a Thief By Grace D. Li 369 pages Tiny Reparations Books The thorny issues of restitution and museums’ complicity in retaining looted artwork do not tend to make for light summer reading. But a breezy new novel turns these issues into the basis of a...
Book Review: Burden of Dreams Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden
Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden Contributors: Donatien Grau, Yayoi Shionoiri, Sydney Stutterheim, Andie Trainer 284 pages Gagosian It’s impossible to think of the Los Angeles art scene without considering Chris Burden, an incisive social...
Book Review: Ballerina Looks Back in Style Serenade: A Balanchine Story by Toni Bentley
Serenade: A Balanchine Story By Toni Bentley 320 Pages Pantheon As a thin, athletic girl with a springy jump and “not-so-great feet,” Toni Bentley was 11 when she entered the School of American Ballet; she was invited into the New York City Ballet company by George...
BOOKS: Forbidden Photos George Platt Lynes' Daring Eye
In 1981 a new photography monograph appeared that seemed like an artifact from a parallel universe. The cover was a studio shot of a nurse flanked by two nude men. Many of the photos in the book depicted nude men in potentially gay scenarios. It had only become legal...
René Magritte and the First Art Gang Book Review of "Magritte: A Life"
Magritte: A Life By Alex Danchev 439 pages, illustrated Pantheon Books When an artist achieves the kind of iconic status where they are known outside of the Art World, there can often be a tendency to codify their myth into something that might pass the Elevator Pitch...
Book Review: STREET ART & SOCCER "The Chosen Few: Aesthetics and Ideology in Football Fan Graffiti and Street Art" By Mitja Velikonja
The Chosen Few: Aesthetics and Ideology in Football Fan Graffiti and Street Art By Mitja Velikonja 176 pages DoppelHouse Press Graffiti and street art are often considered synonymous since they affect the urban environment in similar ways. But graffiti is...
Books: Jona Frank and John Divola SoCal Photographers Cover It All
Jona Frank’s new book, Cherry Hill, came out this spring almost simultaneously, but coincidentally, at the same time as another book, Terminus, by another SoCal photographer, John Divola. The coincidence is as fortunate as it is fortuitous because their subjects and...
Book Review: Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II By Elizabeth Rodini ABJECT OBJECT
Elizabeth Rodini’s Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II (2020) landed on my radar through meeting Rodini last year at the American Academy in Rome, where she is the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director. Rodini’s recent object biography investigates a number of...
James Welling’s “Choreograph” Review of the Photographer's Recent Book
I got to know James Welling over a decade ago when he invited me to teach a graduate seminar in the history of photography at UCLA’s Broad School of the Arts, where he was the director of the photography program. His own photography was a mystery to me then, as it...
Book Review: Set the Night on Fire "Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties" By Mike Davis and Jon Wiener
In this passionate, lovingly detailed historical account of the struggle for social justice from multiple sectors of society in Los Angeles during an epic American decade, Mike Davis and Jon Wiener have written a history of activists who believed in democracy and...