Dennis Hollingsworth

Life in the Margin of Error

Well, there it is. We are living inside the margin of error. The elections have been this way for some time now, too close to call. And with each successive election, increasingly too close to know even after the ballots have been counted. Now, more than ever, we need to rely on the electoral system to process the differences into a result we can all live with. And I hope that next week, it will not be that the best man would win, but that the one who does win is the best by the virtue of our system of government... lest we crumble into mere anarchy.

Has the cat become the observer? It seems that we are now inside Schr?dinger's famous box.

Let's let Cecil finish this one off... sort of:

Now, you'd say the cat either lives or it don't

But quantum mechanics is stubborn and won't.

Statistically speaking, the cat (goes the joke),

Is half a cat breathing and half a cat croaked.

To some this may seem a ridiculous split,

But quantum mechanics must answer, "Tough @#&!

We may not know much, but one thing's fo' sho':

There's things in the cosmos that we cannot know.

Shine light on electrons--you'll cause them to swerve.

The act of observing disturbs the observed--

Which ruins your test. But then if there's no testing

To see if a particle's moving or resting

Why try to conjecture? Pure useless endeavor!

We know probability--certainty, never.'

The effect of this notion? I very much fear

'Twill make doubtful all things that were formerly clear.

Ahora

Notes Over Coffee

Notes Over Coffee, a PruessPress collaboration back in 2003, has been folded into To Illustrate and Multiply: An Open Book, a show at the MOCA Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood.

Nice.

Thanks, Joel!

Beyond the Beyond

"Man Ray is a youthful alchemist forever in quest of the painter's philosopher's stone. May he never find it, as that would bring an end to his experimentations which are the very condition of living art expression."
?Adolf Wolff, "Art Notes", International 8, no. 1 (January 1914), p. 21.
(Source.)

(Ref.: the painter's "philosopher's stone" versus a "living art expression"...)

Headless is More

Starving Artist

Some art professional advice:
Never let them know you're hungry.
(An addition to Penny Aphorisms, also updated: 14, 15 too.)

Cup, Runneth.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend the opening of this show, "Like Lifelike", tonight at UCR's Sweeney gallery:

Like Lifelike
Painting in the Third Dimension

This exhibition puts forth the question: what happens when painting is pulled from the wall and made to stand on its own two feet? The featured artists all take the traditional tools of easel painting, plus a bit of clay, and in array of answers, make works that are presented in the round. These mutant forms confront some unfamiliar issues and generate a fair amount of oddball comedy as they venture into the alien terrain of space. The eight artists in the exhibition include Jacci Den Hartog, Sean Duffy, Mark Dutcher, Tom LaDuke, Jean Lowe, Kaz Oshiro, Michael Reafsnyder, and Henry Taylor. Guest curated by Brad Spence, artist and professor of painting at California State University San Bernardino. Organized by UCR Sweeney Art Gallery.

I would have especially liked to have slapped the back of my friends Michael Reafsnyder, and Henry Taylor, who both will have work in the show.

Instead, we'll be attending a charity dinner, the Carousel of Hope, an organization who seeks to protect children with diabetes.

update:

Ahora

(Thanks for Francis, Craig.)

Seaman Ship!

Notes on PreFab Architecture

I went to see the show on prefab architecture at MoMA last week, Home Delivery. I had a few thoughts about it, here are a few of them:

-There's a lot of post-fab going on in the prefab world, isn't there?

-Strange that none of Marcel's readymades made it into the dialog over the years.

-Fabricating the full spectrum of architectural systems (structural, skin, HVAC, stuff like that) into prefab components must be a bear, especially when only a fragment can be fabricated at a time, to be eventually assembled together on site. Each fragment must possess multiple fragmented systems, to be linked up eventually. That's quite a trick.

Pre-Fab-Frags. That's what they are.

-I began day dreaming about growing a house by planting seeds that could sprout into a home... accelerated life forms like a Nexus-6 replicant that die and anchor in place once they mature into habitable status... "like tears in the rain."

But happier.

Tears of joy.

Home sweet home, time to die.

-What if one could reach into some huge product inventory to pluck and arrange ready made objects into human habitation?

Here are some sketches along those lines:

and

Well... ok. But this scheme needs a structural system to hold everything aloft.

What about something that needs no separate structural system? What if we could stack something together like bricks?

I'd sure like to try this out in P.S.1's courtyard someday.

Notes on Kippenberger at MOCA

This is the best image I could find of the famous photograph of Kippenberger after he was beaten up: "Rioting punks had beat up the former manager of the SO 36 Club in Berlin because they found the price of beer there too high." (Source). A blown up small digital foto of a painting of a photo of the convalescing artist... a placeholder until I can find the exact image.

This was the image I was hoping to find upon entering MOCA's The Problem Perspective, because nothing says "problem" better than a swathe of bloody bandages.

I was a bit let down by the show as shown. Doug Harvey's reference to the artist as a "sleazy trickster" was spot on, and as I cruised the galleries on Grand Avenue, I kept wishing that the curator kept that spirit alive. Instead, I felt that Kippenberger was demystified, overly explained. The work exhibited seemed categorically arranged... I mean, if you went all the way upriver to see Colonel Kurtz, the last thing you would want to hear is an analytic exposition of any kind.

At one point, the show finally snapped together for me. I wasn't feeling it... I wasn't feeling it... why wasn't I feeling it? It wasn't as if there was something missing in the show (other than the foto of his bandaged head), the show was packed with his astounding production... it was just that...

...there was too much... and too organized too. As I cruised through the galleries, one in particular stood out. I've roughed up a drawing in sketchup of the room:

Here, Kippenberger's assemblages are cordoned off and taking up the core of the space, no doubt his design. On three walls, his working drawings -sketches, and noted/dimensioned plans for the sculptures in the center of the room. As you exit, you'll find on the wall, a collection of fotos of the sources of his inspiration, beautiful corners and material incident, what I would imagine were the sources of epiphany for him. Maybe I'm wrong? Maybe this is how Kippenberger had shown his own work? But then....

A DECODER RING!

I DON'T WANT A FRICKIN' DECODER RING!

Especially with MK. How can you sit down for a coffee with a Don Genero and not get bewildered and pissed off from time to time? Could Merlin appear on What's My Line?

Well, maybe he could:

A misleading man he was.

And if Dali was, certainly more so was Martin Kippenberger*.

So why not present the artist in this spirit as well? Kind of like what Bernardini wrote: "...ambiguity and astonishment."

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*an important parenthetical: Or was he?
Off to the bookstore for the catalog and bio!

Kippenberger at MOCA and Beyond

(Note: This will the be the third attempt at this post, my laptop has been playing nasty tricks lately, devouring much along the way. Here is a rough summary of what might have been...)

Kippenberger has always been a favorite artist of mine, despite the fact that I knew very little about him... I operated on the hunch over the past several years concerning what little I knew of his work: that his paintings, his sculptures and installations like the subway entrances, and ultimately his iconic self portrait with bandaged head were sufficient confirmation that his star was an important navigational aid for the art world. I was thrilled to find upon my arrival from Spain Martin Kippenberger's retrospective at MOCA LA. I also had some trepidation that I would be disillusioned by a deeper acquaintance with his oeuvre. Luckily, that wasn't the case... I do have a critique of the presentation of his work however, but more of that later.

Doug Harvey has a great article in the LA Weekly: MARTIN KIPPENBERGER'S "PROBLEM PERSPECTIVE" AT MOCA: ENTER THE K-HOLE The art of obnoxiousness, framing the "sleazy trickster" with all around assholery:

Martin Kippenberger seems to have been a bit of an asshole. I?m not making a judgment, just an observation. Some of my best friends are assholes. I never actually met Kippenberger during his fabled L.A. sojourns in the early ?90s, but, given his epic drinking and insatiable anti-authoritarianism, we probably wouldn?t have found much to argue about. And Kippenberger?s assholism is no secret ? in fact, it was central to his oeuvre, as well as being the reason his work hasn?t received as much attention as it merits. When you do stuff like buy a gray monochrome painting by one of your former art heroes, screw legs into its stretcher bars and display it as a coffee table ? as Kippenberger did with a Gerhard Richter in 1987?s Modell Interconti ? feelings are going to get hurt.

...and then he circumnavigates the poles...

...At this point, Kippenberger?s hermeticism is rendered moot. Or rather, its more pedestrian function ? as knowing winks and secret signs in a Machiavellian fraternity of academic profiteers whose reputations are built entirely on the obscurity of their references ? is superseded. Regardless of the specific targets of his scorn and ridicule, Kippenberger?s volleys were finally symptomatic of a grand vision of the transformational potential of art, in whose service he was willing to play the jester (and court cirrhosis). Hermeticism has traditionally been a symbolic language for encoding and communicating psychologically powerful and politically liberating philosophies. Due to his unfashionable passion, his irrepressible formal chops and his restless invention, Martin Kippenberger imbued even his most sophomoric pranks with this faith in art as a way to awaken from the nightmare of history. Art is the asshole of the Unconscious. Some people are just born without a cork.

Doug Harvey's article does a superb job of describing the artist and his work, and I was particularly impressed that Harvey too saw Kippenberger as prescient. Strolling through the show, I thought of how many younger artists made entire careers from what was for Kippenberger, passing moments or gestures:

It may be less a question of influence than of prescience ? Kippenberger?s relentless skepticism, globetrotting career, impatient and idiosyncratic social/political engagement, and refusal to disavow poetics and beauty (however stripped down or wonky) were all a few years ahead of the curve, but his reputation as a boozy, ridiculously macho troublemaker made him a difficult role model in the go-go ?90s. Many stylistic facets of his all-encompassing Euro-slackerism have since found their way piecemeal into the mainstream of contemporary art in the hands of more compartmentalized (and socially presentable) practitioners. But encountered as a totality, the singular stylistic innovations of his work become secondary to their unifying underlying identity as outbursts of creative insurgency ? an example much harder to follow than, say, making funky furniture out of weird shit and calling it art.

Beyond the Beyond

Shifting from the issue of a general influence versus a specific prescience, my thoughts wafted from Kippenberger's influence on younger painters to the subject of painting versus conceptually driven art in general. Recently, I had a look at the catalogs for a show in Austria called "LA Potential". It was curated at a venue called Hangar-7:

With the LA Potential exhibition the HangART-7 art programme is presenting contemporary art from Los Angeles. More than 60 works bynine young male and female artists are shown in Hangar-7. Programme director Lioba Reddeker worked on the selection together with the Los-Angeles-based artists Hubert Schmalix and Roger Herman.

Roger and Hubert are the former dons behind the scenes of the erstwhile Black Dragon Society. Both UCLA based teachers, they used their pioneer ChinaTown gallery on Chung King Road to port many students young artists into their international careers. I am not aware of any direct connection between them and Kippenberger directly, but I did wonder about and imagine one, at least on the level of their European/Austrian/German take on art and of our PostModern zeitgeist, to touch everyday life with conceptual means.

As I strolled through the Kippenberger show, I kept thinking about "LA Potential" and some of the writing which curatorially framed the show in Austria. From the brochure, the blurb introducing the work of my friend Bart Exposito (whom I have vetted the ideas in this post and concerning which I should state that he does not necessarily endorse them specifically):

The artist's main interest is in the painting itself, as an object beyond any transcendence, that moves through the orbit of art..."

An object beyond any transcendence? Painting is beyond the beyond? Soooooo cool! I want to be beyond the beyond too! What a great solution to the problem of the limitations of the high water mark of Abstract-Expressionism (#2)! If the postmodern implies the modern and they were born as one, bifurcating as they issued forth -where in the latter we indicated G-d through material means and in the former we indicated everyday life through conceptual means- then the problem of our time is how exactly should we surmount this dichotomy? How can we move on? It's crystal clear that Kippenberger was a paragon of PostModernity, constantly indicating everyday life conceptually via the entire spectrum of art media within his reach. This is the very "orbit of art" in our time, isn't it?. To dwell within a single media, especially painting naturally runs against the spirit of the age, albeit one so long in tooth.

If the transcendent was a limitation... well... let's just... jump over it! And there is the idea of this strange creature -painting- that is beyond the beyond like some extra-solar-system entity intercepting the orbit of art, our contested art world dialog in other words. The relevance of painting restored with a capital "P" in our time might be found in the map of the intersection of its' flight path on the orbital geometry of the dialog, one that conforms to the empire of the conceptual with the inescapability of Newton's Law.

Let me try to explain this idea in another way. Painting is accepted and not accepted in our art world today. Painting is at once the odd man out due to the arc of art history (see Bending Light), and also the eternal art form. Painting is simultaneously acknowledged and dismissed. Moreover, few gallerists and curators don't readily know how to talk about it, in contrast to most conceptually based work whose ideas have been well plumbed and talking points are extremely accessible. Most everything -and not in the least, art- is sold with stories and not too many people have the imaginative resources to tell the story of (a) painting ex nihilo. And yet painting is both valued and scorned, diminished as the mere product of the eye when all the while all the eye is the exteriorization of the brain. For most artists, this is a profound problem, for others it is a wonderful place to be. I myself would like to counted in the latter company. How delightful to see this divide described in terms of celestial bodies with painting as a rogue and its' relevance measured by an intercept course with orbital dynamics, the information age as a gravity well.

Heavy, heavy, heavy.

I thought my cup was rather full after reading this, there was much to consider. Then I flipped open the hardback catalog and read Andrew Bernardini's essay (you can check out his blog here, good stuff). I have transcribed it here in full, it's five pages long but he cruises into good territory and you can't find it anyplace else, so a full treatment seems appropriate:

AFTER-SCHOOL DRAMA: THE CURRENT STATE OF PAINTING IN LOS ANGELES

Andrew Berardini

"So I was looking at painting as a strategy and I thought of each painting as analogous to a very fast song by the Ramones, something like that, a very simple idea that could be executed very quickly with minimum fuss, minimum of tools, just done you know essentially in half an afternoon or something."

Tom Lawson at the Glasgow International Symposium, Painting as a New Medium

Painting has both a very hard and a very easy history in Los Angeles. Hard, because in a city dominated by the schools in the last fifty years with their concomitant critiques and theories, has not often been kind to old fashioned tradition of painting, aggressively pushing art seen as less commercial , and in this false dichotomy, somehow more arty. In the 80's, CalArts, a school at the center of death throes of the avant-garde, after producing a swathe of the Pictures generation painters who jettisoned L.A. for New York like Eric Fischl, Matt Mullican, and David Salle, had at one time, not a single painter among its students. Though anecdotal, and therefore unverifiable, it's not hard to believe. Painting still has to justify itself here in a way that I'm sure makes painters endlessly uncomfortable. A situation that LA Times resident curmudgeon/senior art critic Christopher Knight bemoaned in an article titled "Painting gets a Broader Brush," published December 2, 2007. He uses one student painter's complaints as launching point to talk about the state of painting in L.A. art schools:

"When they sneer and say I'm foolish because painting is obsolete, I don't know what to say to them," she said, smiling.

Oh, I thought, that old chestnut. Art, like science and technology used to be discussed in terms of progress. That meant an ancient practice like painting could be obsolete, like absolute monarchy or 8 track tapes. We don't think like that anymore.

"That's easy," I replied. "Say, 'Thank you.' And mean it."

If it's not a problem in the schools, you hear something slightly different in the galleries. "Conceptual painting" beign a phrase I hear tripping of the dealers' tongues. "He's a really thoughtful painter," they say before scurrying off to hopefully do what all dealers aspire to do, make deals.

"That's easy," wrties Knight. Painting in Los Angeles has had an easy history here for the same reasons as everywhere else perhaps, but tweaked by the landscape. After sculpture became a urinal and videotapes and snapshots became the true New Image, painting as a protable and familiar object has remained a market favorite. No need to explain whatever imitation of a critique the video art recently purchased, people (and the less theory-savvy collectors) easily recognize paintings as "art." these are perhaps truisms, but necessary to repeat when talking about young painting in Los Angeles. The schools haven't always been so hard; each of the major ones had a few painters on staff, continuing to kick against the pricks. Tom Lawson at CalArts, Roger Herman at UCLA, James Hayward at Art Center, all mentored a generation of would-be painters in the hostile atmosphere to painting, often still found at universities.

Lawson, who moved to Los Angeles almost twenty years ago and was a seminal figure in the painting wars of the '80s, saw painting, as he puts it in his seminal article published in ArtForum in October 1981, as the "last exit": "Radical artists now are faced with a choice," he wrote, "despair, or the last exit: painting."

He saw painting as "perfect camouflage... allow[ing] one to place critical esthetic activity at the center of the marketplace, where it can cause the most trouble." I quote Lawson extensively as he was and is one of the most vocal recent godfathers of painting in Los Angeles, bringing an incisive critical approach mixed with punk rock energy to his regular writings in magazines and books. His students have gone far and include Laura Owens, Monique Prieto, and Ingrid Calame. But many of the painters in Los Angeles, though a good portion having passed through its art schools, seem to have no godfathers or godmothers. They seem, like apunk rock generation, to pick up the tools and have a go at it. Many worked without the weight of history, painting friends and scenes, international pop with the rough energy of a fan, marked with an eager naivet?, whether put on or not, found in the most ardent admirers. One of the nodes of painting in Los Angeles has more affinity with K Records, DIY twee, and sunshiny earnestness, seen in the work of artists like painter MAri Eastman, or to expand the field of media, with sculptor Anna Sew Hoy. If they thought about history at all, it was with an irreverence often cited in the sculptural and conceptual art of colleagues and teachers, like Mike Kelly, Richard Jackson, Mike Bouchet, and the late Jason Rhoades.

But if Los Angeles painters choose mentors outside of their university, they choose whomever they like, trawling history for inspiration from where it may come. In America, Clement Greenberg and Ad Reinhardt amongst other, killed painting, at least as we knew it. In Europe, the tradition never faded, the death of painting never a question in the conversation, and great painting continued there unabated, from Polke to Richter and to the current crop of Eastern European wunderkind like Wilhelm Sasnal and Adrian Ghenie. American painters, influenced by Europe and pop culture, have attempted to reform a tradition to pull painting out of the theoretical coffin , and make it dance a Western song. Many graduate level fine art programs no longer have life-drawing classes, and no matter how many intellectuals decry that painting ain't dead, try being one in Los Angeles, and not feel like a zombie.

But like its diffuse landscape there is no Los Angeles style, or Los Angeles school of painting. But there are nodes, imaginary neighborhoods, gathering places, shared points of reference: the different university programs are one, the elder painters who have made their home here another, each other as a community a crucial third. After a cold reception in London, R.B. Kitaj moved here ostensibly to hide out, but his style (historical, referential, expressively figurative and literary) can be found in the succeeding generation of L.A. painters, Alexander Grant in an interview with me quoted him as an important reference point. His fellow British Pop painter David Hockney came to Los Angeles as well, adn his cool palette and flattened terrains reflect a foreigner's imaginary of Los Angeles, but Hockney came more for the handsome poolside boys than he did for any art scene. But for both painters, L.A. in different ways became a haven; a place Europeans went to avoid the weight of history, chase boys and paint.

The two arguments one hears in the bars after the openings, from art students fresh from critiques, and in the occasional magazine article push two different versions of what art should be. On one side are dyed in the wool painters, painter's painters and the other could care little about painting, though they sometimes use it (and drawing to reference the human hand as an element of creation), in the service of a historical-theoretical argument. The two sides, and I would call it an argument but neither side really cares to talk to each other anymore, runs on one side as the sheer, unadulterated pleasure of paint. Advanced here in Los Angeles by tired Modernist like James Hayward and his student Daniel Mendel-Black, critic David Pagel, and critic/painter Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe damaging a generation of artists with their push toward the formal, the technical, and the so-called "beautiful," amounting to me as anodyne actions from artists dooming themselves as derivative references to a dead dialogue. Hayward, a tall cowboy with a booming voice, always wearing a Stetson hat and a perennial joint hanging from the side of his mouth, reminds one of the heroic painters that we stopped needing sometime in the '70s. He's been doing similar paintings for thirty years and they consist of thickly layered impasto rising inches off the surface, abstractions where the whole process of painting is about the pleasure of the thick gooey paint. Pagel, in a similar vein but not quite so retro, pushes through his essays and methodologies a kind of art though not limited to any particular medium, in many ways limited by medium. His essays (which can easily be found at the LA Times website) dive deeply into descriptive passages whose thoughts are repeated clich?s and the only liveliness of the writing consists of gushing, perceptual forays, so amorphous as to be almost unquotable. As the reader can tell, I have little patience for either of these methods, and this proposition is advanced more thoughtfully but with the same faults by Art Center of Pasadena's own resident aestheticist Gilbert-Rolfe adn the famously, prickly critic regularly tripping the light fantastic, Dave Hickey.

To quote a few passages of Gilbert-Rolfe from an interview in the Brooklyn Rail in May 2005, we see both his emphasis on beauty and his repugnance to the other side of the divide:

"That's very much what 1974 was like. Suddenly idiots theorizing art exclusively as a matter of historical production, things like joseph Kosuth signing philosophers the way Andy signed soup cans, were being taken seriously.

Of course that completely fucked painting, because it could now be treated purely as an historical object by a discourse devoted entirely to death- of painting, of modernism, of the author but not the dealer. I've described the situation regarding the recurrent and constant death of painting and also of Kant as paralleling Derrida's refutation of Fukuyama's preservatoin of Marx as ghost in order to that he may be the one who finally lays the threat to rest. Painting has been preserved as a ghost so that successive generation of productivists can demonstrate that it's their critical ritual that can finally exorcise it. As to your earlier question about my painting and writing, when people look at my paintings I'd appreciate it if they'd recall that they are made by the person who demonstrated not only ostensively but also in prose that the death of painting is a crock of shit."

Wow. Both his demonstrable knowledge of theory/philosophy and his fierce reactionary energy are told with a kind of verve I can't help but appreciate, even if i think gilbert-Rolfe is on the wrong side of history. An intellectual defense of the superficial, the purely beautiful, is not only untimely, but also unconscionable: the intellectual defense of Paris Hilton (though I'm sure this is knocking around as a thesis somewhere in academia). Gilbert-Rolfe is a particularly interesting case study, as a founder of the journal October, the mouthpiece of Rosalind Krauss and a very academically driven discourse on contemporary art with countless adherents, few of them artists.

But nor do I think the post-Marxists and theory heads are on the right side of history either. On the other side side of the divide, leftists and theoretical critiques still have legs, and the teachers (and it's always the teachers) still pushing this work understand it often less than their students, hastily translated French theory often puts Baudrillard, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault at the same champagne party, and while yes, they may speak the same language of philosophy they've as much in common with one another as any two people speaking any language, pluck two Englishmen off the streets, and they'd agree as much as Baudrillard and Foucault. But French theory has been, many years after its main practitioners have either died or stopped writing is still being pushed as viable ways to talk about art, teh same class that has a A Thousand Plateaus on the syllabus is likely to have neo-Marxist claptrap by Hart and Negri, such as Empire. If the practitioners of this school of practice look at painting at all it's as either commodities or illustration for this theory or another. Though it's hard to find painter's these days who dig into this, there are members of the expanded field coalition of post-media artists who still use these rather tired critiques as blunt tools. Sam Durant and Charles Gains, to concentrate on two artists/teachers in an L.A. school who still cling to this model, both resort to history and philosophy as crutches to their didactic art. Both are experts on the instructional four-page press release evidenced in recent shows, Gaines at Suzanne Vielmetter and Durant around the corner in Culver City at Blum and Poe. These press releases underline how little they care about sensuality as to be the dustiest of professors with little care for the human hand; humanity easily exchanged for convoluted histories as to be entirely random without a lick of humor. Assistants then duly execute the work. an excerpt from Charles Gaines press release for his current show at Suzanne Vielmetter Berlin Projects illustrates this: "In Randomized Text: History of Stars," photographs of the night sky are paired with handwritten texts of sentences from two books, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez, and Orientalism by Edward Said. The sentences are based on a randomizing system in which alternate sentences from each book are combined according to the letter of the first word in a previous sentence. The result is a text whose actual meanings remain arbitrary in relation to the sequence of the sentences (the system) that produced them."

While one school of critique becomes too sensual, obsessed literally with surfaces, the other is senselessly bricked in by books only half-understood and pushing art that a political action committee as opposed to what is the true spirit of art: ambiguity and astonishment. Pure sensuality seems as dunderheaded as tired whinging leftist politicking and any remnants of theory driven-art still somehow finding a happy home with historians.

Los Angeles painters, and they are not all made equally, at their best walk in-between these distantly American with fierce manifestations in L.A. schools, and they do so without any weight of history except for recent, they regularly (though perhaps not regularly enough) break with their teachers.

Perhaps the dealers are right, everyone like a thoughtful painter, but we'll politely discard their market term "Conceptual Painting" and just call it what it is, artist who think.

Painting is as much a part of the expanded field as any other medium; the formalist and theoretical bets are off. And in the diverse Los Angeles landscape, where for decades buildings could be thrown up with little care for local style or historical precedent, painters can make whatevver they want and happily they do. Though I've come full circle to the end of the essay to say I don't really think about painting. The medium is no longer the message. The medium is what it always was, a vehicle to get you someplace, hopefully interesting; for artists who paint, that destination is of course up to them. Painting never died, but painting in a certain way died, and after a long tea time with French theory in Los Angeles, painting has an energy because if it uses these debates at all, they're merely tools in an arsenal full of other options, the primary being their own visions as artists, picking up the tools at hand and with minimum fuss and exploding on the canvas with the energy of a Ramones song.

Andrew Berardini

"...the true spirit of art: ambiguity and astonishment."

Nice.

Variable Star

(Image Source. ...incredible pictures, worth checking it out)

Helen Verhoven at Mesler & Hug

Helen Verhoeven
Events One and Two

October 18 - November 15 2008
Reception: October 18, 6-8pm

MESLER&HUG
510 Bernard Street
Los Angeles, CA

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I'm cooking up a few blogposts in a game of catch up (NYC and more). Much has to be done by the end of the weekend, so please stay tuned for more bloggy goodness. Tonight, I'll be at the opening of Helen Verhoven's new paintings tonight at the end of the Alpine Street cul-de-sac, the old/new Mesler&Hug gallery.

See you there?

sebirt

Kindness requires no theory.

Sunset in New York

As my hours in NYC dwindle down, a bit of Electric Relaxation from my favorite tribe.

It's been a great visit: friends and subways and taxis and galleries and museums and openings and chilled out parties and great food from the street to smart restaurants. I've got much to blog and little time, so bear with me whilst I mash the next several blogposts up for you all, some of it a little bit of catch up from the week before I left for the East Coast too.

New York is a magnificent city, there's no other like it... but then again, home for me is LA (and Tossa too, in a smaller but important measure) and it's going to be good to get on the AirTrain to JFK. Not only my honey and friends are all there waiting for me, but I have a Fall and Winter of work in a new studio in ChinaTown LA pending my arrival.

It has been... and it's going to be... fantastic.

sebirt

Beneath the beach,
the paving stones.

Champion Zero at Rental Gallery NY

I'm in New York this week to see some shows and raise a high five for my friends Drew Heitzler, and Flora Wiegmann who are having a retrospective of Champion Fine Art at Joel Mesler's Rental Gallery.

From the Rental Gallery press release:

RENTAL is pleased to announce Champion Zero, an exhibition organized by Champion
Fine Art, opening October 9, 2008 and running through November 7, 2008.

Champion Fine Art was a two-year series of artist-curated exhibitions, initiated by Drew Heitzler and Flora Wiegmann. The twenty-one exhibitions were titled numerically in descending order. The first ten exhibitions took place at 281 N. 7th Street, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, from September 2003 through August 2004. The remaining eleven shows took place at 6703 Comey Avenue, in Los Angeles, California from October 2004 through October 2005.

The exhibition, Champion Zero, coincides with the publication of Champion Zero by 2nd Cannons Press, a full color catalog that documents the Champion project by re-printing and compiling the 21 zines that were printed to accompany each Champion exhibition. For this exhibition at RENTAL, Champion Fine Art will invite the ten artists who organized shows for the gallery when it was located in Brooklyn, New York. These artists include Drew Heitzler, Reed Anderson, Carol Bove, Allyson Vieira, Steven Parrino, Josh Smith, Mai-Thu Perret, David Shaw, Roe Ethridge, and Fia Backstrom.

A second exhibition will be mounted in October of 2009 in Los Angeles, at which point, Champion Fine Art will invite the 11 artists who organized shows for Champion?s Culver City location. Those artists include Matt Johnson, Katherine Bernhardt, Monique van Genderen, Alix Lambert, John Tremblay, Craig Kalpakjian, Walead Beshty, Anna Sew Hoy, Guy Richards Smit, Michael Zahn and Public Holiday Projects.

Additionally, on November 7th, 2008, at 8PM, ChampionDance (dancers Flora Wiegmann and Felicia Ballos) will conclude the New York exhibition with a performance at RENTAL. Reprising their Deinstallation Series, a suite of nine dances produced in Champion?s New York gallery from 2003-2004, they will bring the series to a close with one final performance.

Gallery hours: Wed ? Sun, 12-6PM
For more

Titles

Caprichosa
ww#306
91x76 cm

Moving with the Mind A Wander
ww#307
91x76 cm

Tides and Eddies and Currents and Undertow
ww#308
91x76 cm

Whim and Gravity
ww#309
180x160 cm

?Mago, Mago, Ven Aqui!
ww#310
180x160 cm

A Happy Laoco?n
ww#311
180x160 cm

The Wrecks of Nations*1
ww#312
91x76 cm

Damocles*2
ww#313
180x160 cm

Lastre Variable
ww#314
91x76 cm

All Nature's Difference Keeps All Nature's Peace
ww#315
180x160 cm

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*1 The title: "The Wrecks of Nations" comes from the audiobook: Civilization and its Enemies by Lee Harris, whose preface is graced by a quote from Walter Bagehot. I thought I would have had a post up on this before now.

*2 This title popped in my head as I was painting it, I relaxed once again the iron law that dictates that all titles come from the loam of blogposts.

Snap to Grid

It took about twelve hours until it felt like I'd never left.

So I slept it off.

Something's Happening

(I'll be visiting New York next week.)

Martin, into the Corner, You

Kippenberger is in town.

Wonderful.

reboot