Trying to communicate the plot of Matthew Barney’s recent, nearly six-hour opera, River of Fundament, makes me feel like the SNL character Stefon ...“The movie has everything: Fran Lebowitz, gold-leafed poop, Egyptian gods, Elaine Stritch, classic cars, Maggie...
With my eyes acting as an open lens, I turn my gaze out onto the world in all its permutations and my mind begins to organize images and methods of articulation.Borderland is an epic painting that concludes almost a year-and-a-half’s work. The images evolve from...
For years he was the bad boy of the art world, known for his sawn-in-half cows, his pickled sharks and his diamond-encrusted skull that cost as much as the national debt of a small third world country. There were also the medicine cabinets full of pills and surgical...
Many collectors are the most influential people you’ve never heard of. Not so Stefan Simchowitz, the art collector who has been dubbed the “art world’s patron Satan” (New York Times Magazine), “the greatest art-flipper of them all” and “a Sith Lord from the...
These statues, never really alive, were visiting the Getty like ghosts from the past, and they have traveled an odd underwater route to get here. Afraid that these magnificent bronzes would be melted down into weaponry and coins, their owners dragged them out to sea...
Step off the Metro line at Crenshaw and Martin Luther King in 2019, and the first thing you’ll be greeted by is the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, a gray monolith of Macy’s, Sears and Wal-Mart. But look further south down Crenshaw, and you’ll notice an afro rising like...
Agnes Varda is the sort of filmmaker that is always worth paying attention to. According to many film historians, her 1954 film La Pointe Courte was the first French New Wave film. A peek at YouTube reveals a 200-video playlist assembled by obsessed fans. (She gives...
Thirsty and SoberDear Babs, I’m an artist. I want to succeed. I don’t drink. I’m in AA. Every art opening I go to has booze. What do I do? —Nick, Los AngelesDear Nick, Drink water.Pretty BabyDear Babs, It seems like you have to be beautiful to be a successful young...
The Broad Is Here Inaugural Show is a Highlights Survey Here comes The Broad! The striking white cube with diagonal perforations holding the contemporary art collection of Eli and Edythe Broad finally opened to the public on Sept. 20—after a delay of nearly a year due...
Gazing out of a window or peering into a painting: both imply curiosity, perhaps driven by a sense of longing, for what is beyond. John McAllister’s paintings self-reflexively allude to this, highlighting their own window-like rectangularity while presenting snapshots...
“A Cold War,” Jamison Carter’s current solo exhibition, and his second with Klowden Mann, revisits dichotomous themes introduced in his 2013 solo exhibition with the gallery, in which he explored the tensions that exist between man’s pervasive desire for advancement...
The series of relatively small digital photomontages Clayton Campbell has assembled under the rubric “Wild Kingdom” satirize social habits—on more than just the most evident levels. The images, all horizontal, consist of wildlife dioramas, the kind that fill corridor...
One measure of a contemporary artist’s success is that he or she allows us to view the world, our history, or ourselves differently; Candice Lin is notable for doing all three. Her mixed-media work upsets epistemological meta-narratives, conflates binaries and revels...
Contrary to certain art historical narratives, painting has never waned, but only been ever more rigorously interrogated—usually by the artists engaged with the medium. Chris Barnard is one of those artists mining and turning over the modernist tropes of figural...
John Baldessari once said that art should make you stop and look as you’re crossing through a museum. Mark Jenkins’ sculpture-installations certainly break one’s forward momentum. On entering the gallery you’re confronted with a clothed leg and shoed foot growing from...
he beasts of burden in Cynthia Minet’s conceptually and politically astute project include an elephant, pack dogs and birds of prey (vultures/falcons/raptors). Internally illuminated by LEDs and created from recycled and repurposed plastic fragments of all shapes,...
“These Carnations Defy Language” started with Alexandra Grant and Steve Roden’s mutual enchantment with the writings of the French poet and essayist, Francis Ponge. Ponge created a form of prose poetry, in which he worked with highly ambiguous and elliptical language...
Our experience of the natural world is mediated through filters both internal and external. The scientific term “Haptic Rendering” refers to a robotic interface that allows users to “touch” virtual objects. Francesco Igory Deiana, who recently presented a series of...
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