Articles
GALLERY DOGS (and a bird!)
LUDOLOGY
This month’s game is an art contest. You must make it. Specifically, you must make a work of art that is perfect for Instagram and made at Instagram scale. Make a rectangular art object that exists in the real world (no digital art), and make that object no larger than 3 inches wide by 4 inches tall. Make the best object you can, scan or photograph it and send the result to:...
Helmut Lang’s Burdensome Bodies
The R.M. Schindler House is unexpectedly quiet. Despite being smack-dab in the middle of West Hollywood, there’s a noticeable lack of noise around the house and grounds, as if the air is somehow thick enough to deaden dog barks and car horns. The silence somehow feels borne of the house rather than its surroundings. As one of three Los Angeles headquarters for the MAK Center for Art and...
MOURNING SICKNESS A spate of Sad Girl art is on view in LA this spring—but is our interest in Sad Girls subversive or exploitative?
Thérésa Tallien, the French Revolution’s ‘it’ girl, knew how to manipulate perception. Once an emblem of revolutionary glamour, she played the game until it turned against her. Even in captivity, awaiting execution, she refused to become a simple object of pity. The mirror sent to her cell each day wasn’t punishment; it was a tool. Stripped of adornment, starved, pale, she studied herself—not to...
Reviews
Duelling Reviews: Jon Rafman at Sprüth Magers
Alex Israel at Gagosian
To prepare for his current show “Noir” at Gagosian, Alex Israel claims to have walked about fifteen thousand steps per day around Los Angeles. This is highly unusual and, honestly, suspect. As the saying goes, no one walks in LA. Yet Israel insists on it and says that...
Michelle Uckotter at Matthew Brown
There’s something in the Los Angeles air recently that’s been conjuring the ghost of Charles Manson. He has been coming up in conversation frequently (or maybe I am bringing him up). California’s back on the national stage for its hippie-turned-fascist tendencies....
Jacqueline Humphries at Matthew Marks
We recognize the legacy Jacqueline Humphries is working from the moment we set foot in Matthew Marks’ two gallery spaces; yet something throws the viewer slightly off. It’s the echt gestural vocabulary of post-World War II art, but as if viewed through a scrim or...
Ramsey Alderson at Tiffany's
It’s a matter of complete coincidence that Ramsey Alderson’s show “d’Or” at Tiffany’s—an East Hollywood artist-run garage space programmed by Adam Verdugo—coincides with the 17th anniversary of the notorious Emos vs. Punks Fight held in Mexico City’s Glorieta de Los...