Poet Wallace Stevens, in his seminal poem “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction,” eschews a literal interpretation of anything, vying instead for a Greenbergian-like approach to art, indeed to life itself, privileging purity in abstraction over narrative. This recent...
Offering a more complete picture of the artist than the one beloved in popular imagination, “Keith Haring: The Political Line,” at the de Young in San Francisco illuminates a more radical and shamanistic side that seems to be fuel and lifeblood for the playful and...
First of all, soda and gardeners don’t usually go together; that’s not to say that all gardeners must abstain from soda or that soda doesn’t sometimes yearn for the garden, but it’s an unlikely alliance, yet Jason McLean’s exhibition at Wilding Cran is a playful and...
Monique Prieto’s newest exhibition aptly titled Hat Dance, on view at the brand new LAM Gallery on Highland Avenue, charts like the banned Mexican dance it was named for: a kind of radiant courtship between the artist and the painting, and further still between the...
I was generally sympathetic to the examination of remote machinic vision on display at XPO Gallery, with their presentation of a Brooklyn-heavy group show that is weirdly shut to the public: HIKE, HACK, HIC et NUNC. Interestingly, it coincided with the punch of...
The opening night of the LA Art Show offered the usual enticements—free food and drink, opportunities for schmoozing and networking, celebrity-gawking—but it also happened to have a great deal of impressive contemporary art on display. Here, in no especial order, are...
Max Presneill has broken through to the “other side” and by this I do not mean he’s cavorting with spirits, but simply that he has in his second exhibition at the Garboushian Gallery in Beverly Hills created a stunningly rigorous body of work that even the dead would...
Robert Heinecken was truly obsessed with modern culture and all its sometimes unfortunate and always ubiquitous vicissitudes. Using a wide range of materials including photography, sculpture, video, printmaking and collage, the artist recontextualized images toward a...
It’s an amazing true story—the real story behind the phenomenally successful paintings of those children with those big, sad eyes of the ’50s and ’60s, the ones that defined “kitsch.” We always thought it was this fellow named Walter Keane who painted them, but it...
What do Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Richard Prince and Jeff Koons have in common? If you answered all are old white-guy artists that make lots of money with their art, you would have answered correctly. But they have another thing in common. They are all NOT...
Almost since its inception, photography has been characterized by historians and critics as perpetually in crisis. The current divergent trends—a democratizing of the form through digital cameras and social media vs. the ontological investigation of the medium by...
In 1955, the 31-year-old Swiss photographer Robert Frank went looking for America, driving 10,000 miles across 30 states, in a kind of photographic enactment of Jack Kerouac’s beat novel, On the Road. If the novel functions today as a rite of passage for disaffected...
The Marjorie Cameron exhibition arrives before one enters the gallery. It comes on the streets of West Hollywood. Banners hang from every other streetlight, advertising the MOCA show, featuring the artist’s self-portrait. Cameron was the consummate Los Angeles...
Mark Steven Greenfield has been something of a fixture on the Los Angeles art scene since the 1970s, better known as an administrator and arts advocate than as an artist. Greenfield has not bowed out of high-profile art-related activity altogether, but he is now able...
Death, destruction, strife and pollution—the pairing of Kris Kuksi’s and Preston Daniels’ variations of dark sensationalism transport us to their version of artistically-mediated Armageddon, with each creating unique and hauntingly extravagant objects. Kuksi’s baroque...
A master of text-based montage working in the traditions of Fluxus, Concrete Poetry and Dada, Tm Gratkowski pays homage to artists like Kurt Schwitters and Tristan Tzara, whose complex word/image juxtapositions were imbued with cultural critiques. Trained as both an...
Geomorphology—the study of the evolution and formation of Earth’s topographic and bathymetric features—forms the basis of Andy Moses’ new work at William Turner. Moses has taken his cue for these paintings from the richly complex formations of the Earth’s surface that...
Lita Albuquerque transformed the Orange County community of Laguna Beach in November for the Laguna Art Museum’s (LAM) second annual Art + Nature. This multidisciplinary event/happening/festival showcased Albuquerque, who is known for her ethereal works of art,...
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