Ten years ago, when I learned of the existence of a film called Trona, shot in the desert hellhole of the same name, I feared the worst, especially when I learned that it was a thesis film by a CalArts graduate. It was hard to imagine anybody associated with that...
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,...
To find a curatorial through-line for the wildly varied career of Frank Stella must be an enormous challenge. Hanging opposite the elevators on the new Whitney’s fifth floor, as a kind of preamble to “Frank Stella: A Retrospective,” are Pratfall (1974), a precise...
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...
The sculptures and videos in Same Rock are based on a “little Switzerland” in Appalachia, founded on the promise of its similarity to the Alps, and explore myths of universality, aesthetic deception, and the politics and economics of mountains. Please Enjoy… offers...
Part journey of self-discovery, part family history, part window into an artist’s oeuvre, Sally Mann’s memoir Hold Still is simply wonderful, sharing that same combination of hauntingly beautiful lyricism and truth that are the hallmarks of her photographs.For most...
With trunk tucked up compactly—the elephant’s signof defeat—he resisted, but is the child of reason now. His straight trunk seems to say: when what we hoped for came to nothing, we revived.—From “Elephants,” Marianne Moore Dick Blau uses his camera to map...
According to his Wikipedia entry, this is Michael Peppiatt’s eighth book about Francis Bacon. If all of his Bacon books were packaged like a deluxe DVD, this would be the really good feature length documentary about the “making of.” He certainly deserves to tell his...
Last year I was invited to view a controversial painting that the owner claimed to be a genuine Rothko he bought at a small LA auction many years ago. The painting was not officially included in the Rothko catalogue raisonné despite the fact that the owner discovered...
Archiving cultural ephemera is a tricky business. Anyone who’s followed my writing for even a brief time will have encountered some kind of rant about how the institutional canonization of cultural insurrections like Punk, zine culture, hippies, beats, etc.,—or...
Long films aren’t new. As early as 1914, there was a film (The Photo-Drama of Creation) that ran eight hours. Wikipedia lists at least five films from that decade, which ran at least six hours. In 1971 Jacques Rivette made a famous 13-hour film (Out: One) that had one...
The most famous Hollywood movie I appeared in was Roger Corman's Death Race 2000, which was bizarre because coming from New York, I didn’t know how to drive yet. Over the years the movie became one of the most popular American films in Europe, including France....
Looking like contorted urns collapsing inward or twisting outward, the 16 new cup-sized works that comprise “The Weight of Color,” Kathy Butterly’s fifth show with Shoshana Wayne Gallery, demonstrate her strength as an innovator. Working within the confines of a long...
In his essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” film theorist André Bazin observed that image-making was “no longer a question of survival after death, but of a larger concept, the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal...
The individual works in Devin Troy Strother’s 2010 solo debut were tiny spectacles, collages full of frolicking figures and bright shards of colored paper that extended beyond the confines of the frames. In his current exhibition “They Should’ve Never Given You Niggas...
ROCK AND ROLL IS FOR THE BIRDSDear Babs, What do you think about using live animals in an artwork? I recently went to a museum in Montreal and witnessed an entire exhibition of finches playing guitars! The air conditioning was blasting and I thought they needed little...
Humor is often a neglected muse in the production of fine art. Seldom is it thought of as a legitimate field of cultural inquiry or a productive platform for the creation of an aesthetic. Los Angeles-based mixed media artist Marc Horowitz, known for his socially...
DANGEROUS TERRITORYLOCAL HOMIES ANSWER MACCARONE GALLERYSometimes gentrification can backfire, especially if you crow about it too loudly. Last September New York gallerist Michele Maccarone told The New York Times that Boyle Heights, where she was opening her LA...
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