Articles
My Favorite Cézanne The Only Impressionist Painting I Actually Like
Every time I say I don’t like Impressionism people lose their minds—and I get it, people love the stuff, can’t get enough. I admit that I sometimes say it just to freak them out, because you should see the looks. I mean, you’re probably looking at me like that right now. I can hear it too: But Western painters had never thought about light that way before! The way they deconstructed figures and elements of a scene into their millions of coups de lumiere, fusing the atmosphere to the actions such that the true subject became the physical nature of light itself! The way they involved science and mechanics, responding to the advent of the...
The Suburbs Are Dead? Brad Eberhard Makes Noise with Alto Beta
“Well, there were many creatures in the cave. And some of them had their problems, but all of them, they were my friends....You don’t meet friends like this every day, so I’m staying in the cave.” —Wounded Lion, “Creatures in the Cave” I first met Brad Eberhard earlier this year when I agreed at the last minute to fill in as a DJ at an opening at Alto Beta, the art space he started in March 2022. Tucked into an Altadena strip mall between a pizza joint and performance venue, PDA (Public Displays of Altadena), Alto Beta houses a scrappy, DIY ethos within a crisp, white box format. The interior of the modest one-room gallery is bounded on one...
Excavating Natural History Mark Dion Explores the Sticky Wonders and Legacy of the La Brea Tar Pits
As an urban kid growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I adored the American Museum of Natural History. The low-lit museum seemed like a palace of wonders to me. In its inner chambers the glowing dioramas of exotic animals in their native habitats appeared like scenarios from a dream, at once factual, scientific and a bit surreal. So, when I first discovered Mark Dion’s brilliant, dreamlike natural history–oriented work in the mid-1990s, I was instantly enthralled. Displaying the offices of unlikely nature-oriented civic agencies or effusively baffling cabinets of curiosities, Dion’s works seemed fantastical, yet also rigorously...
Linda Vallejo A New Exhibition at parrasch heijnen Showcases Five Decades of the Artist’s Work
Linda Vallejo’s career-spanning exhibition at parrasch heijen is a homecoming of sorts. The gallery is ensconced in the center of Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights district, where she was born, and a stone’s throw from the iconic Sears Building — an area where Vallejo spent much of her career’s formative years — as well as the legendary Self-Help Graphics (SHG), a critical art-production and community center that has focused on social justice since its founding in the early 1970s. Vallejo possesses a storied history in Los Angeles and is a self-described postmodern woman working in a multitude of media including painting, prints, drawings,...
The Appropriated Strike Back Is the Idea of What and Who Is Appropriatable Changing?
While many of the contemporary art world’s basic assumptions have been challenged in recent years, one that has remained remarkably constant since at least the 1960s is the collective verdict on appropriation: It’s fine! Andy did it, so it must be—and too many foundationally (and financially) important artists—from Roy Lichtenstein to Barbara Kruger and Sherrie Levine—built their entire careers on pieces whose visual impact derives largely from the power of images made by other artists. It’s safe to say that the current art world could barely exist if it hadn’t been decided long ago that changing the context of someone else’s image...
![The Harrison Studio [Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison] Survival Piece #1: Air, Earth Water, Interface or Annual Hog Pasture Mix (1970-71) at Various Small Fires](https://artillerymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/HAR007_Survival-Piece-2_1971_24x36_Install-View-01.jpg)
