Maybe every gesture that you make can birth a fresh way of living. Perhaps by merely looking over your shoulder, or touching the ground, you can create a brand new philosophy or a radical break with reality. So argued the dancers in the Trisha Brown Dance Company at the Getty Museum last Friday, on March 10. The nine performers assembled in the Getty’s Tram Arrival Plaza at 2 pm, all dressed in...
It’s cold. He looks even larger in his winter coat. He is a large man. Tall and broad-shouldered. In football, he might be a tight end; I’ve stood next to several players for the Bears. He would not seem out of place among such large men except that the hair on his head and beard is flecked with gray. He has just arrived at his studio—a swift bike ride from Soldier Field (yes, Chicagoans ride...
If there is anybody more unpopular in Mexico at the moment than President Enrique Peña Nieto, it is, of course, Donald J. Trump. After a long list of aggressions, rudeness and even “jokes” by Trump, and in the middle of a big domestic crisis—both political and economic, rooted in corruption of Mexican government, but aggravated by the imminent breakdown of the North American Free Trade Agreement...
Five years ago, San Francisco–based painter, sculptor and performance artist Ana Teresa Fernández woke from a long night’s sleep with a sudden inspiration: She would erase the border fence that divides the United States and Mexico. It was June, 2011. That October, President Barack Obama would announce the record deportation of nearly 400,000 people. The year before, the U.S. Senate rejected the...
Kim Abeles’ studio doesn’t have enough chairs, so we have to sit in the adjacent gallery space at the front entrance of the building. Even though it’s glaringly sunny outside, it’s freezing inside the space as attendees spill into the room and sit down on rolling office chairs, stools, wood blocks and ledges. This is a meeting of the Association of Hysteric Curators, a self-described “fluid Los...
Nan Goldin, to borrow a phrase from her friend and fellow-artist David Wojnarowicz, has always lived and worked “close to the knives.” Her most recent published collection, Diving for Pearls, can only intensify our appreciation for her images of that pain and that exultation. In many ways, Diving for Pearls continues the so-called snapshot aesthetic indelibly associated with Goldin’s name after...
A lot has changed over the last two years in the world of water. The high level of lead found in children living in Flint, Michigan—exposed by consuming and bathing in Flint River tap water—was brought to the nation’s attention. And last fall, over 10,000 Keystone Pipeline resisters showed up at Standing Rock in North Dakota to show solidarity with the Sioux tribe protecting the Missouri River....
Tony Conrad is one of the unlikeliest figures to be the subject of the kind of late-career historical recontextualization that authenticity-starved hipster youth have made their simulacral avant-garde. Don’t get me wrong. His bona fides are all in place; a pivotal figure in 1960s NYC experimental circles—the Velvet Underground was formed in his loft for God’s sake!—but his scattershot oeuvre and...
“She’s famous for her use of negative space.” The security guard’s soft voice wafted over to me from the corner of the gallery. I stood in the white cathedral of LACMA’s Broad Contemporary building, narrowing my eyes at a huge expanse of what looked like nearly nothing. MacArthur “Genius” Grant-winning Toba Khedoori’s massive and recondite oil-on-wax drawings of a table and a chair, a...
Every now and then an artist pops above the horizon line with a private cosmology like the late Mati Klarwein whose Aleph Sanctuary in the 1970s was a marvel of jewel-like paintings. An artist like Alex Grey known for his visionary painting and his "Chapel of Sacred Mirrors" currently resides in Chelsea, New York. For one month right in our very midst and showing at the Highways Performance...
In Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (2012) bell hooks states, “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.” Such words were actualized in “Known & Understood: Selections from the Permanent Collection” on...
There are few forces in the world as powerful as memory. Reconjuring the fleeting scents of former lovers and the chattering sounds of childhood, memory evinces that life is composed of so much more than the here and now; it summons impressions that both soothe the...
Working in a continuous exegesis of an overarching project, pursuing branching pathways to their conclusions then returning to the center and setting off again, Alison O’Daniel transforms elusive ideas and ambiguous experiences into concrete objects—still and moving...
The initial apprehension upon entry to Ei Arakawa’s exhibition took a few moments to subside. It was swiftly alleviated upon realizing that it is not an exhibition in the typical sense but more of a journey through a cardboard-constructed maze: a metaphorical...
Upon entering Helen J Gallery, the electric sounds produced by the neon lights of Ahn Hyong Nam’s dynamic sculptures pour into visitors’ ears and plunges them into the artist's reimagined matrix. As the show's title implies, "Automatic Nature," Ahn's work investigates...
Amir Zaki's exhibition 'On Being Here' presents hyper-real, large-scale color photographs of piers in Southern California. In each image, Zaki divides the composition into two sections, juxtaposing a view on the pier looking towards the ocean with another from the...
At the ICA Los Angeles, curators Marcelle Joseph and Legacy Russell have assembled 25 artists whose practices engage with the construction of identity and the self as subject –or, as Judith Butler puts it, The Condition of Being Addressable. This international and...
Kristopher Raos’ "No Escaping the Housework" is an eye-popping splash of vibrant color. His bold works are highly refined pop art which depict the packaging for a variety of different cleaning products. Technically untitled, each piece indicates a “product” name and...
A grotesque feeling of excitement and misery shivers through me whenever I encounter Mika Rottenberg’s work. Her stories of monstrous mechanisms of hypercapitalism are infused with a queasy comedy that reminds me of Julia Kristeva’s “laughter of the apocalypse”...
A pair of exhibitions each in their own manner engage with formula and intuition. In Portraits: Invented Subjects and Divergent Styles, 90 works (all acrylic on paper, 30 x 22 inches, 2015-22) by Nathan Redwood form a tight procession flanking the walls in grids and...