Commerce imitates art. If you recently spent a small fortune to attend a cultural event in a desert locale, it probably contains DNA from a series of conceptual concerts that were staged in the Los Angeles area between 1983 and 1985. The organizer of these events was...
Many conceptual artists employ sign painting techniques, but few execute such craftsmanship on their own. That's partly what renders Norm Laich so intriguing. Overlapping shows at ICA LA and AWHRHWAR complement one another to provide insight into Laich's work as...
On any given Friday, between noon and 2 p.m., you’ll find one of Los Angeles’ best taco trucks parked downtown on 3rd Street in the middle of the Arts District. How do I know this? Because Jonathan Gold says so. “Let’s meet at Guerrilla Tacos,” the LA Times food...
May marks half a century since the student and worker protests against rising unemployment and poverty under Charles de Gaulle’s conservative government in France. In May 1968, students and faculty at the L’ecole des Beaux-Arts took over the lithography studio and...
Kerry Tribe’s film Standardized Patient, which was commissioned by SFMoMA in 2017 and is currently at 1301PE, is a filmic expression of thoughtful storytelling centered on a controlled social environment that is often unexplored within the wooly conceptual arts—the...
It’s been a tumultuous week in Los Angeles; and for a change, we can’t blame it entirely on the Putin-wannabe currently installed in The White House or his cronies and GOP enablers – notwithstanding the fact that he happened to blow into town this same week to pick a...
Minnie Panis has a problem with existence. Minnie, budding Dutch conceptual artist and central character in Niña Weijers’ debut novel The Consequences, finds the idea of her own existence an excruciatingly difficult one. In this, however, she is not alone. The notion...
China had its first major avant-garde exhibition in 1989, which was also the year of the Tiananmen protests. The exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” (through Jan. 7, 2018) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, acknowledges that sea...
DIFFICULT SUBJECT MATTER DEAR BABS: In my art practice, I gravitate toward using ephemeral media and creating installations. Sometimes my work deals with “difficult” subject matter. Do most gallery owners steer clear of those qualities in art because it is challenging...
French conceptual artist Sophie Calle’s exhibition at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, "Beau doublé, Monsieur le marquis! Sophie Calle et son invitée Serena Carone" is Calle’s first exhibition in France since her retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2003,...
In the new Swedish film The Square directed by Ruben Ostlund, Christian (Claes Bang ) is the hip and handsome chief curator of X-Royal, a major contemporary art museum so-named because it is set in a former royal palace. After being pickpocketed on the street, he does...
It’s often said that the victor writes the history, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that men, and society in general, have been victorious in writing an exclusionary narrative after ignoring women for centuries. Art history books, museums and other established...
“Memories of Underdevelopment” is a sweeping exhibition composed of 400 objects from more than 50 artists from eight countries throughout Latin America. It shares its title with the 1968 movie directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea about the Cuban revolution and associated...
In much of his work, Paul McCarthy explores juvenilia to an uncomfortably advanced degree, finding profane inspiration in all things coprocentric and aesthetically offensive. But McCarthy’s current exhibition at the Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles gallery appears to...
You might call Liz Young a conceptual artist. One would certainly address some of her earlier work in such terms; and on a certain level, she still is – except that in her hands, the ‘concept’ is really a kind of generative nucleus of ideas, assuming form organically,...
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...
We talk about this art and that art, and then we either start seeing influences or start making them up. A popular one is the Asian influence on the Impressionists, who we like to consider our greatest artists but we really mean most popular. However, comparing these...
There’s a new smell in town, and the best way to find the source is by following your nose down Grand Avenue to MOCA. Yeah, I thought it was coming from the room of stale, day-old Rothkos too, but it doesn’t take long to figure out that the odor comes from the R.M....
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