Trying to actually define The Situationists is a slippery business. The more people who weigh in on what they were about, the more confusing it becomes. As an official art movement, Situationism existed from 1957 to 1972. They are considered a missing link between...
SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO Dear Babs, I’m thinking about leaving the U.S. and moving to Berlin because this country is about to explode and also because everyone says Berlin is better for artists. Is this true? How would I go about making this move? —Thomas Newton,...
Revolution in the Making “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity ...” Charles Dickens was writing about London and Paris before and...
A friend of mine spent election night serving drinks at a bar in Highland Park. During the day she worked in her studio—she was preparing for an upcoming gallery exhibition. In the evenings she makes a living bartending. Before the election results poured in, she...
Yves Klein is having a moment. If one goes to the news section of the Yves Klein Archives, one will notice that there has recently been a discernible uptick in the number of recent exhibitions of his work. Given that he died in 1962—at an unexpectedly young age—this...
“We are children of our landscape [which] dictates behavior and even thought,” writes Lawrence Durrell. It goes without saying, therefore, that a baneful “landscape”—defined in the broadest terms—has devastating effects on the inhabitants. At the Huntsville Museum of...
Danielle Brazell is the general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, appointed by Mayor Eric Garcetti in 2014. Today the DCA has a budget of $42 million with 64 fulltime staff, a municipal art gallery (LAMAG) and 18 community art centers. Through...
The first and most physically imposing work in Thomas Houseago’s exhibition, “The Ridge,” on view at Gagosian Gallery, is Open Wall (Beautiful Wall) (2016). According to his Instagram, Houseago built this wall in response to the election of Donald Trump. This alone is...
Laura Forman’s debut solo show at Sloan Projects—a rather small collection of six new artworks that differ clearly from each other—induces curiosity and offers a wide range of possible interpretations. Created in 2016, her oeuvre (all works untitled) reflects the vibe...
Egan Frantz’s show, “The Oat Paintings,” provides a possible opening into a discussion of the nature of political art: how we distinguish it from among the myriad latent political aspects of most other art; how we recognize and define its characteristics; how it...
For Rachel Lachowicz, lipstick—the actual infused-wax substance—has long functioned not simply as a gimmick, or brand, or even social signifier, but as a kind of idée fixe, a material so embedded in our culture, and so closely associated with femininity, that it...
In Orkideh Torabi’s caricatures of silly men, comedy and poignancy stealthily overcome the unsuspecting viewer. Midway through this exhibition, one is liable to titter aloud as the portraits’ repetitive simplicity resounds to a starkly touching yet hilarious effect....
Jill Mulleady’s new paintings offer an experience akin to tumbling down a rabbit hole into a mad and decadent party orchestrated by the Surrealists (is that a cheetah sitting at the counter? A policeman fighting a green coyote?) and attended by reveling sinners,...
Unexpected Portrait (2016) is a large-scale acrylic-on-canvas painting where a long tube-shaped orange line with dark edges glides across the work defining a cartoon-like head and shoulders. Two simple dots for eyes and a short line for a mouth are similarly...
If Lauren DiCioccio’s chosen materials of fabric, thread and found objects at first appear playful and lighthearted, a closer look reveals the disturbing little works assembled in “Comfort Objects” as apropos of the collective mood of wariness, of the persistent...
Paul Anthony Smith’s third solo exhibition at ZieherSmith represents an ultimately fruitful distillation, apparently in both the methods of his practice, and subsequently in the visual nature of the roughly dozen works that make it up. “Procession,” as Smith’s latest...
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