lu·dol·o·gy /l(j)uˈdɑlədʒi/ n A field of cultural studies that examines games, the act of playing them, and the players and cultures that surround them. It is also known as game studies or gaming theory. Have you read about art that “investigates transcultural neo-hybridity” or “undermines normative articulations of gender” lately? Send us the single most art-bullshit-riddled sentence you’ve...
Artillery catches up with GWAR for their sprawling retrospective at Beyond the Streets. ARTILLERY: Some of GWAR’s songs are actually good—if you’re into thrash. Does it ever bother you that this sometimes gets lost in the focus on GWAR’s wild stage shows? BLOTHAR: Don’t seem so surprised that we write good music! After forty years, we should have learned something. Honestly, it doesn’t bother us...
On a quiet, hilly residential street in Echo Park, behind an unassuming fence, there is a cathedral to freewheeling sexuality, a place where art and sex mingle to such an extent it can be hard to tell the difference. Most Angelenos will be familiar with the Tom of Finland House, the charming 1912 gabled Craftsman where artist Touko Laaksonen drew thousands of horny pictures of cartoonishly sexy...
With one notable exception, the original cast of This Is Spinal Tap were wildly successful thespians playing complete fuckups. Arguably the most iconic character of the lot, the exploding drummer “played” by everyman Ric Parnell, was another story altogether. The tall, angular skin pounder shown pondering the fate of his predecessors—while lounging in a bubble bath with a shower cap on his...
I’m not sure exactly when I accepted that the future of contemporary art belongs to the furries. It likely happened at the waterfront rave in Pittsburgh—where, flanked by gyrating, half-clad wolves and sexy tigers—I spent the late hours of July 4th lounging with a collective of anthropomorphic artists, dangling our legs over the dark waters of the Allegheny River and talking big ideas, until we...
In her 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin reimagines human history not as a tale of conquest, but as one of containment. She proposes that the first human tool was not a spear, but a vessel—a bag, a bowl, a bottle. If stories are “carrier...
Once, when I was 12 or 13, I was looking at Fernand Léger’s 1925 painting Composition in the European wing of LACMA’s since-demolished Ahmanson Building when I noticed a small termite crawling across the surface. Slightly alarmed, I notified an elderly gallery...
The news of BLUM’s abrupt closure after 30 years in Los Angeles reframed the landmark gallery’s final exhibition, Wilhelm Sasnal’s “AAAsphalt,” into an inadvertent elegy for contemporary art in Los Angeles. Entering the massive complex on an early July afternoon, I...
The night I saw Kaoru Ueda’s self-titled show at Nonaka-Hill, I found myself later at a friend’s house watching YouTube videos of marine life. The viewing experience of the vibrating patterned creatures felt nearly identical to Ueda’s obsessively precise paintings of...
To read a novel is to play detective. The detective novel leverages this symmetry: the reader identifies with Sherlock Holmes’s or Philip Marlowe’s driving curiosity. Our favorite sleuths want to get to the heart of the crime; we want to get to the end of the story....