From its troubled (I almost want to say stuttering) conception and creation, through its earliest publication – barely stitched together, edited, revised, corrected, re-edited – Melville’s Billy Budd is steeped in ambiguity – ambiguities integral to the dramatic and...
uncompromising tangPaige Wery’s latest endeavor takes her full-circle back to her interest in self-taught artists with the opening of The Good Luck Gallery, Chinatown, Los Angeles, which will exclusively exhibit non-formally trained artists. The Good Luck Gallery’s...
And all the Rest: ADAA, Independent, SCOPE, (UN)FAIROn Friday, I started the day off with another VIP event, this time at Scandinavia House hosted by the Nordic consulates. (You’ve got to hand it to the Scandinavians. In addition to everything else they get right,...
Was that a review I just read or did the snooze alarm go off again? The way they box up the art reviews in the Los Angeles Times, it’s sometimes hard to tell. The reviewer, Sharon Mizota’s focus seems to be on formula – which is not inappropriate here: the subject...
Dear Readers,Troublemaker Dave Hickey blew into town last month. The outspoken art critic held forth at the Grand Central Market, gracing Angelenos with his caustic observations about the corroding art world. There was much tweetin’ and hollerin’ after (and apparently...
When I drove up to Zackary Drucker’s home off San Fernando Road, the front door was wide open—a startling sight since most of the surrounding houses have metal bars over the windows and doors. The Los Angeles video and performance artist lives in Glassell Park, an...
If one thinks of the essence of Modernism as being about direct experience rather than recreated experience, the artist who has really continued to expand possibilities is James Turrell. A striking aspect of his retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles County...
In 1987, the year his son Brady turned two, Abelardo Morell lay down on the nursery floor in order to see the world the way a wriggling baby would. From that vantage point he looked up at a stack of blocks towering over him as if it were a BCE column or stele, and he...
In many Japanese artistic traditions, from sword making to ceramics, creative techniques have been passed down from generation to generation. Some artists today can boast that they are the 15th generation of an artist family, tracing their roots to the 17th century....
As I meandered through Marisol Rendón’s installation, “So, Dragons Do Exist?” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles gallery last summer (this was before I had even glanced at the contrarian, almost self-negating parenthetical subtitle, “Considerations of the Unavoidable...
Painting is like the proverbial zombie. It’s supposed to be dead but it won’t lie down. The last 50 years in British art has been something of a paint-splattered war zone. Against the odds of prevailing abstraction, Pop and Conceptualism, painters such as Francis...
There is a popular stereotype of the 20th-century artist as a hard-living bon vivant who lives to paint and leaves a trail of broken hearts. Most current versions this type have a brand to maintain. The last thing you can imagine such a person wanting is privacy....
Something special but virtually hidden exists here in SoCal, and it’s a reminder that visual art, despite the occasional headline-grabbing event, is essentially an underground activity operating on the margins of our society. The Pete and Susan Barrett Art Gallery of...
Now that musicals are getting popular again, it’s a good time to revisit the work of Jacques Demy. Although he is considered part of the French new wave, most of his work owes more to Hollywood musicals and live-action fairy-tale films. His first musical (The...
I heard a rumor that some artists went to visit Henri Rousseau and were shocked that he put one of his paintings on the floor for them to walk on because he didn’t have a rug. Was he naive? Crazy? Suffering from low self-esteem? It doesn’t matter. He was unique and so...
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the weird inversions of mainstream and underground culture, particularly as regards formats—the vinyl record for example. Talking with Rick and Joe Potts and Dennis Duck (all founding members of the Los Angeles Free Music Society) on...
Since its inception in 2002 The Wende Museum’s corporate park location has had a discreet charm. The easy-to-miss suite is tucked behind a landscaped parking lot in a hive off Slauson in the former Fox Hills Mall— Culver City adjacent. Its charms unfold as you make...
A special place exists within those fleeting moments transitioning from slumber into an awakened state. In those few seconds when dreamscape combines with reality, both a mild confusion and an eerie comfort sets in. Our mind sifts, sorts and makes sense of what is...
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