We live in interesting times—possibly the end of time, or at least the end of history as humans have conceived it over the last few millennia (an irony Francis Fukuyama never considered in the dislocated thesis for his 1989 essay and 1992 book, nor for that matter many of his critics). These epochal changes have been accompanied by a shift of consciousness, reflected and complemented by a range...
Octavio Paz wrote, “this hour has the shape of a pause.” Adriana Salazar’s videos situate us inside such a pause, places where we are in nature while watching human artifacts become nature. I met Salazar in Mexico City this past November, though I knew of her work from 2013 and 2014 solo exhibitions at Grand Central Art Center and UCR ARTSblock and her inclusion in the 2013 California-Pacific...
In the late ‘70s, I would carry the Sony Portapak for my artist stepmother, Rabyn Blake, across muddy fields in Southern France as she filmed a shepherdess whose name sounded like “leg of lamb” in French, or shot shimmering vistas of Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire. (She had maneuvered my father into taking his sabbatical in Aix-en-Provence, I now believe, so that she could bathe in that light...
Anwar Congo is a stone-cold killer.He is also a petty gangster, a wealthy if somewhat eccentric paterfamilias, something of a dandy (never wear white to an interrogation or a political execution), a local celebrity with connections to an abysmally corrupt government, and an aspiring star in his own fantastic, even operatic film. For him, that imagined role of a lifetime is itself embedded in...
Laurie Anderson fairly disappeared in the gaping vastness of the darkened Park Avenue Armory. Standing, violin in hand, next to a Lincoln Memorial–sized plaster sculpture of an armchair, she told the story of Mohammed el Gharani.El Gharani—or rather his shimmering likeness, beamed live from West Africa for seven hours on each of three consecutive days in October—gazed over the thousand or so...
Editor's note:This piece about the current crop of art shows in Paris was submitted to us days before the latest round of carnage in the City of Light. The recent attacks certainly overshadow the offerings at any of these exhibitions, but as you'll see below, some of the materials on display directly address the social and political questions highlighted by the conflict with global terror. Our...
Perhaps the best example of the depth and breadth of Sandow Birk’s artistic oeuvre, along with its powerful social/political implications, is his recently completed “American Qur’an,” nine years in the making. Birk conceived of this series during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when he was devouring the news each day, often hearing demeaning stories about Islam from politicians and...
Considering the degree to which historians live in the past, Amelia Jones may not be what you’d expect. Confronting cultural biases relating to the politics of identity, she seems as much social activist as art historian.Via art history, Jones speaks out against the art world’s entrenched sexism and racism, challenging the field’s most authoritative voices for insistently promoting a straight...
On a hot August night in the Pico-Union neighborhood near Downtown Los Angeles, Nuttaphol (pronounced nut-tah-pun) Ma welcomed me to The China Outpost, the project the 43-year-old artist calls a nomadic, self-imposed sweatshop, which bleeds into his living space at the St. Valentine building just a few blocks west of the Staples Center. From the balcony of his apartment, the buildings and neon...
During her childhood in provincial Nigeria, Shiri Mordechay recalls traversing roadways littered with human skulls, glimpsing live babies discarded in trash cans and being spellbound by a harrowing band of voodoo practitioners that surrounded her abode and pounded insistently on its doors and windows. A green mamba once encircled her ankles while she sat at a classroom desk. Years later, in...
Doubtless you’ve seen the billboards: the Immersive Van Gogh exhibit has shown in cities across North America, and now it’s Los Angeles’ turn. It’s Time To Gogh! commands the sign, and I oblige, stepping into the old Amoeba building on Sunset Boulevard, which will...
Independence. Freedom. Unchecked mobility. We’re quick to attribute these qualities to the automobile: grand, sweeping, all-encompassing statements that turn the machine into an intractable, totalizing force to be glimpsed from the outside-in. We think less about the...
There is a single painting that dominates this exhibition, a painting—if one can describe it so—of such singularity that it renders the other works as experiments, exercises, considerations. All are lesser and unworthy contenders. Its only and quite distant challenger...
An art show without images or really even objects, Dreaming in Smell presents a suite of micro-stories that express themselves not in pictures or shapes, but in scents. It includes a smell so cool it’s like a breeze on the skin; a face-crinkling assault of mold and...
For New York based multi-media artist Hank Willis Thomas, art and politics are intertwined. He draws from history, advertising (he made a series based on the Nike swoosh), and current events to create works that address issues of racial injustice, identity politics,...
Diaphanous panels of fabric, suspended from the ceiling appear to float throughout the main gallery, yet upon closer inspection these tulle panels reveal some areas that have been tightly stitched while others are allowed to billow freely. Color is insinuated with a...
Long-fascinated formally by shape, chromatic modulation, and their definition of a place and its contours, Mary Weatherford’s work has evolved into an abstract geography of incident—a geography that continues to become more expansive in every sense. The title of her...
When one enters the massive gallery at California African American Museum occupied by “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” it’s easy to be seduced by the cacophony of bold color, textures and geometric patterns. Power symbols appear and disappear like a nickelodeon on...
In his new collection of powerful figurative images and mysterious abstract photographs, Brendan Lott proves he is both “Looking In and Looking Out.” The exhibition is curated across two rooms at Walter Maciel, allowing viewers to move between intriguing and intimate...
It has been a while since David Rubin ended his long and distinguished career as an institutional curator, but he continues to write and curate—and continues to produce art as well. Rubin had put aside his youthful artmaking once his curatorial direction took over,...