Dear Readers,When I started writing as opposed to making art, there was a lot of disapproval from my friends and colleagues. I was thrilled with my new creative outlet and found it to be more gratifying than painting. One comment from an editor was a little puzzling....
And the vampire pendulum swings back to another extreme: vile, wretched, diseased and genocidal. The FX channel is due to air The Strain this July based on a trilogy written by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan: The Strain (2009), The Fall (2010), and Night Eternal...
Dear Readers, The biggest art news in Los Angeles today is the arrival of MOCA’s new director, Philippe Vergne, whom staff writer Ezrha Jean Black interviews for this issue. Although Artillery instantly voiced skepticism when his predecessor came on board a few years...
A search of William Burroughs on Amazon turns up 3,976 items. If you add the word biography to your search, it narrows down to 135 items. Barry Miles wrote a biography of him in 1993, and released a revised version in 2002. He has also written books about Allen...
We all wonder about the secret life of quiet people—surely, there’s turbulence churning beneath placid surfaces. In the fascinating new documentary Finding Vivian Maier, we follow John Maloof, a self-styled photo historian and first-time filmmaker, on his journey to...
Dear Readers,Troublemaker Dave Hickey blew into town last month. The outspoken art critic held forth at the Grand Central Market, gracing Angelenos with his caustic observations about the corroding art world. There was much tweetin’ and hollerin’ after (and apparently...
There is a popular stereotype of the 20th-century artist as a hard-living bon vivant who lives to paint and leaves a trail of broken hearts. Most current versions this type have a brand to maintain. The last thing you can imagine such a person wanting is privacy....
Since its inception in 2002 The Wende Museum’s corporate park location has had a discreet charm. The easy-to-miss suite is tucked behind a landscaped parking lot in a hive off Slauson in the former Fox Hills Mall— Culver City adjacent. Its charms unfold as you make...
Dear Readers,My mother always told me, “It’s a man’s world.” I vividly remember her saying that to me when I was crying in my bedroom after my boyfriend stood me up. Mom consoled me with those words, while patting my head and wiping away my tears. She also told me...
Forty years after his death, Henry Darger remains one of America’s most polarizing artists. Given that he died unknown and virtually friendless, it is a testament to the power of his work that people are still arguing over what it all means. The very reason we know he...
“The basic premise of Learning from Las Vegas is that the car has significantly shaped the form of the contemporary American city.” This simple statement seems so manifestly obvious: both trivial and unassailable. Yet in the hands of Martino Stierli, it is embedded...
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...
Dear Readers, Cold trickling creeks, running rivers and green woods were my surroundings growing up. That’s where we played as children and partied as teenagers. When I moved to Southern California, the unchanging climate and landscape were a bit unsettling—they still...
In Scott Stark’s The Realist—fresh off premieres at the Toronto and New York film festivals, and screening later this month as part of a REDCAT nano-retrospective of Stark’s three-plus decades of tenacious experimentalism—a gaga pair of drop-dead gorgeous...
Steampunk is a recent Populist art movement that glorifies unique, handmade objects and fashion from the Brass Age, an era lasting from the first large scale manufacture of nautical brass around 1830 until the mid 1920s, when automobiles no longer used brass fittings....
Dear Readers, Suddenly, big is all around. Big, meaning huge spaces to create art in. Big, meaning large works to hang in gargantuan galleries. Big used to be considered vulgar but now it’s vogue. Big was garish, wasteful, decadent and dumb. Now it’s smart and...
While sagas of personal transformation are a staple of recent nonfiction filmmaking—from U.N. peacekeeper Roméo Dallaire’s inexorable drift into despair (and back) in the CBC’s Rwanda documentary Shake Hands With the Devil, to crack-mom Kirk White’s unexpected ascent...
Most stories about larger-than-life male artists and their girlfriends/wives share a familiar arc—he overshadows her. When Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner bought a house in East Hampton, Pollock got to work in the barn, Krasner painted in the bedroom. It was only...
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