The image of “the road” is one of the metaphors most deeply embedded in the American cultural landscape, perhaps most poignantly for the inter-war generation that produced both Dennis Hopper (born 1936) and Jack Kerouac (born 1922) among so many others.Beginning in...
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Melinda Machado Media Contact,National Museum of American History T: (202) 633-3129The National Museum of American History to Exhibit Artworks by Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George W. BushThe National...
Ryan Trecartin Reaches for the Supporting Stars
If you have not seen Ryan Trecartin’s videos, imagine flipping at break-neck speed through 500 channels of reality TV contestants in garish makeup reading random fragments of text from the Internet out loud. More readily, you could also just go check them out on Vimeo...
Silly Putty – The Selling of Jeff Koons
One thing that came across in Jeff Koons’ recent Broad-sponsored (“Un-Private”) conversation with John Waters was a sense of the satisfaction Koons took from his work as a bond salesman and commodities trader on Wall Street. His fascination with commercial exchange...
GUEST LECTURE: Mike Kelley
Mike Kelley participated in our Guest Lecture series by providing this spread that he designed specifically for the centerfold of our March/April issue of 2009. John Waters is also the featured cover story in this very special issue.
To Protect & Serve: Philippe Vergne
The word he kept returning to was “conversation,” which, under less pressing circumstances, might have described our interview, except that Philippe Vergne, MOCA’s new director, was on a something of a treadmill. He had scarcely been on the job 10 days, and had...
Mike Kelley: Part 2
Mike Kelley said for years that he would agree to be profiled in Artillery. That was practically a running joke when we would see each other at art events. Finally, in early November 2011, I contacted him to make it happen. He emailed to say he was very busy but he...
American Gumbo: Wayne Thiebaud
While most people half his age are searching for their car keys, Wayne Thiebaud, now 93, peppers conversations with literary references and recalls in vivid, sensual detail the coat that Hans Hoffman wore at an art reception 50 years ago—“it was so thick that it...
The Unruly Muse
When I first read about Beatriz da Costa’s exhibition last year in Southern California, it sounded intense; I was intrigued and determined to see the show at the Laguna Art Museum. It featured da Costa’s most recent work drawing on the practice of engaging the...
Jeffrey Vallance Presents A Seance with Andy Warhol
Who knew? Who knew that Andy Warhol would become an angel, full of love and the love of God and the beauty that surrounds him in the heavens above? Last night, at the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, artist Jeffrey Vallance conducted a séance with psychic medium...
William Kentridge’s “The Refusal of Time”
William Kentridge's dazzling "The Refusal of Time," at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, marries science and art in an installation that comprises a 30-minute, 5-channel video featuring live stop-action animation, the spoken word and music projected on three walls of a...
Spectacular Subdivision in Wonder Valley
The desert is a surprising place, and we see it anew when artists are drawn there by site-specific projects such as “Spectacular Subdivision,” which took place recently in Wonder Valley over the weekend of April 4 through 6. About 35 artists made work for two sites,...
Robbert Flick: “Freeways,” at Rose Gallery
When I was just out of school and began my first regular daily commute of the Southern California freeways, I remember stealing glances to either side of the road. I caught brief glimpses of the fleeting vistas, noting how with every quarter mile, my vantage point...
Guest Lecture: F. Scott Hess
The subject matter of several of my recent paintings derives from screwed-up iPhone panorama photographs. For centuries art linear perspective has ordered the space of paintings, determining how we look at an image. In panorama mode my iPhone-5 liberates the mind from...
TRADING PLACES
When I drove up to Zackary Drucker’s home off San Fernando Road, the front door was wide open—a startling sight since most of the surrounding houses have metal bars over the windows and doors. The Los Angeles video and performance artist lives in Glassell Park, an...
Psychedelic Shack
If one thinks of the essence of Modernism as being about direct experience rather than recreated experience, the artist who has really continued to expand possibilities is James Turrell. A striking aspect of his retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles County...
Camera Obscura by Abelardo Morell
In 1987, the year his son Brady turned two, Abelardo Morell lay down on the nursery floor in order to see the world the way a wriggling baby would. From that vantage point he looked up at a stack of blocks towering over him as if it were a BCE column or stele, and he...
A Chip Off the Old Block
In many Japanese artistic traditions, from sword making to ceramics, creative techniques have been passed down from generation to generation. Some artists today can boast that they are the 15th generation of an artist family, tracing their roots to the 17th century....