“Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city.” —Dorothy Parker This is a column about the Los Angeles art world. Or at least it was supposed to be. I successfully pitched this column on Wednesday December 4th, 2024 and my editor assigned me a deadline of Saturday,...
Even though the term ‘performance art’ has become a catch-all phrase, it still feels too narrow to convey the onstage antics of Dynasty Handbag, the performance persona of writer, visual artist and actor Jibz Cameron. When Titanic Depression debuted in New York in...
Chez Coronado Founded by Andy Little and Calli Webb and nestled in an unused portion of a basement under an apartment building, Chez Coronado specializes (so far) in works that, like the space, are small, intimate, personal and eccentric. Their most recent offerings...
The 40-Year Funeral By Pat Williams There are very few people alive today that can remember a time when conceptual art was considered to be unusual. To most of us it came as a given, buried in among our earliest memories of museum-going. You enter with a parent or two...
The shower scene in Psycho. You know it, everyone’s seen it. Go to the end. We follow a trail of blood and water through the tub, then push in as it swirls down the drain. In this moment, always, I beg Hitchcock to follow the zoom, to continue completely down the...
Jingze Du’s exhibition “True Colors” features the most well-executed oils in recent memory and all of them are of cute animals. The animals are mostly uninflected white, and their cuteness is eerie and synthetic. The painting itself is restricted to points of defining...
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris had already segued from performance and music to painting and printmaking before completing her MFA at Yale, but she foregrounds the performative aspect of her approach in “Breach of Confidentiality,” her debut solo exhibition at Walter Maciel...
The entrance to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s exhibition at Lisson Gallery, “Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form” is partially blocked by a curved wooden wall. The wall commands recognition, separating the exhibition from the outside world. It immediately invites the visitor to...
If the sculpture of concrete’s last big cultural “moment” (sometime in the 2010s) was typified by figurative and abstract cement statuary that merely winked at its Home Depot provenance, Lauren Bon foregrounds this material in all its blunt, obdurate force. “Concrete...
On a rainy Saturday in early November, I spent the better part of an hour sitting cross-legged inside an XL dog crate. I did so in order to watch the screens mounted to the crate’s interior that broadcast Matthew Lax’s two-channel video, A TIRED DOG IS A GOOD DOG,...
The re-examination—some would say reawakening—of radical artistic movements in the postwar era has exposed the technological as well as ideological stew out of which the digital activism of today’s art emerged. The performance and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s...
Walead Beshty brings five distinct bodies of work together in his exhibition “Profit and Loss” at Regen Projects. In each of these projects, Beshty recasts familiar urban materials (vinyl, newspaper, cement) to expose the undercurrent of suffering and desperation in...
It is a high season for Piccle P. People with no prior special interest in street art keep bringing him up on their stories and reels, asking about the work, and pointing out Piccles while driving—though they don’t know his name. “The heart guy,” they call him—because...
Adrift between lust and sleep, the highway unwinds behind closed eyes, in scratchy sheets and stinging heat. A one-way street on repeat. Cracking the veneer, stripping it away, in the obvious light of day. Coming from nowhere, going nowhere, but never far enough. The...
Top 3 beers? Okay, without a doubt—Guinness. And because I’m in LA, I’m going to say Pacifico. And a can of Stella. Top 3 songs? Dirty Old Town by the Pogues. Sara by Bob Dylan. Chelsea Hotel #2 by Leonard Cohen. Top 3 dead painters? Alfred Wallis. Vincent, of course....
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