January 28, 2011
Ahora
I'm listening to Al Jajaeera Live, breaking news. Highly recommended ahora.
January 26, 2011
What does get your attention, in a media-saturated world?
A remnant image from the Tunisian protests, I lost the source but I thought it would be best to share it with you anyway.
The title is derived from Claire Berlinski here.
Flo6x8
This seems to have led to this:
And then this:
And then this:
Interesting site: flo6x8. Via Boing Boing:
Spanish anti-capitalist activists Flo6x8 staged this epic flamenco/rumba flashmob at a branch of Santander. Their excellent dance was too much for the bystanders, and soon 30 of the bank's customers were dancing along.This is much better than attacking banker's homes and cars.
Southern Sudan, Tunisia, Egypt...
Is this a new era dawning? Or just another day?
Excellent commentary from Claire Berlinski here, she's an American living in Istanbul. "We owe it to them at least to try to understand what's happening."
January 25, 2011
January 24, 2011
Japan Again
I've got a date for a show at Tomio Koyama's gallery in Kyoto this fall. I can't wait to be in Japan again.
(This is an interesting site: Stuck in Customs. Via.)
Car City
This is the VW Autostadt , Wolfsburg , the delivery centre tower. View from below here.
Other Car City parking solutions here via Gizmodo.
Background notes:
Parallel Cities is something I came up with shortly after graduating from architecture school, a general scheme that seeks to unite and define three kinds of urbanism: traditional (Human City), ultra modern (Car City) and the various interpolations between the two.
The Human City is somewhere between Leon Krier(*1) and Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, or what is known today as New Urbanism. The appeal of this is about human scale, thinking of cities in terms of urban quarters, encouraging pedestrian urban space. Problems arise when one goes about trying to manifest this urban type without resorting to arbitrary restrictions to freedom which results in Disney-ification.
The Car City(*2) is about the appeal of the imagination and the consequences that ensue, both heavenly and nightmarish.
The interpolation is about transducing inhabitants from cars to pedestrians and visa versa.
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*1: Favorite book from Krier: Houses, Palaces, Cities. Local representative here in Southern California: architect Stefanos Polyzoides, who enjoys another article on his work this week in the LATimes: Stefanos Polyzoides plans to make cities more livable.
*2: Best representative of the Car City ethos: Rem Koolhaas. Anyone who could imagine Delirious New York understands the craving to extend human experience beyond the limitations of human form.
January 20, 2011
Bart Exposito, Friday at Tom Solomon Gallery
Bart Exposito will be opening his show at Tom Solomon Gallery this Friday. From the gallery's press release:
Thomas Solomon Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works on paper by Los Angeles artist BART EXPOSITO. This is the artist?s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will open at Thomas Solomon Gallery with a reception for the artist on Friday January 21st, 6 ? 8 PM at 427 Bernard Street, Chinatown, Los Angeles.Considered one of the most well regarded painters of his generation, Exposito has developed and maintained a unique voice in the milieu of abstraction. For more than a decade he has produced beautiful, subtle, intelligent works that evoke design and architecture, as well as nod to the hard-edged abstraction of his predecessors. After years of painting and drawing on parallel trajectories, in 2009/10 the artist turned his attention to paper as a distinct medium, elevated from its often subordinate position within the art hierarchy that privileges ephemera and concept within the contemporary dialogue. "Paper Primitives" as an exhibition title implies that drawings are preparatory, ?primitive? paintings; but also alludes to characteristics of history and language, unaffected, original, not derivative of another form. Rather than subject his practice to a bifurcation between ?study? and final work, Exposito has developed a technique and mastery of material that produces works on any scale, on canvas or paper, that share the same DNA. Using both wet and dry media in harmonious partnership and to wonderful formal effect, painting is revealed as drawing and drawing is revealed as painting, and the traditional lines between them begin to dissolve. Yet the immediacy and purity of the medium, however, signify that drawing is, as the exhibition title proposes, the form from which all others have been derived. The exhibition will include a collection of new works (all 2010/11), mostly on paper, and for the first time preparatory studies, inviting the viewer for the first time into his practice. The installation will carry the viewer from pencil sketches ? the most immediate and perhaps most pure works an artist can create ? to mature, exquisitely rendered images in acrylic and pastel on paper and canvas. Themes of landscape, architecture and figuration will be visible throughout, and formal and conceptual connections will be made across works in all media.
Bart Exposito was born in Amarillo, Texas. He received his BFA from the University of Texas, Austin (1998) and MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA (2000). He has exhibited nationally in galleries and museums including the Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, California; University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles; Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles; Creative Artists Agency, Los Angeles; Claremont Graduate University; Galerie Grimm/Rosenfeld, M?nich, Germany; and Galerie f?r Gegenwartskunst, Bremen, Germany. In 2009, Exposito was included in the exhibition Abstract America at the Saatchi Gallery, London (catalogue). Public collections include Bank of America, Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Ohio and Saatchi Gallery, London. Bart Exposito lives and works in Los Angeles.
January 19, 2011
Phil Wagner at UNT/TLED
If you're in New York, be sure to see Phil Wagner's show at UNT/TLED!
I should have had this up a week ago, the opening was last Sunday. I wrote up a statement for Joel Mesler, after a conversation we had about Phil's work over drinks at Hop Louie. There was this vision I had about Phil driving backwards through art history like a demolition derby... or was it a cloud and prisms and rays shooting through planes of art history... or both? I could see the planes align to a vanishing point.
I'd like to sit Phil down with a camera and video a conversation with him about how he made work from discards from his part time work at MOCA as a preparator. I think this was a hugely transitional phase for him. He was a balls out painter for some time partly during and before that. He kept destabilizing his painting practice until he arrived at a formal praxis which eventually internalized instability in terms of assemblage. It was a short step from the trash bins at MOCA to the street, and I see his work today inflected with the orientation to contemporary art at an order of which is institutional and authoritative. I prefer my influences to come out of my pores, and I think this is what he does. Phil is such a down to earth guy that I'd have to twist his arm, but I'd bet he'd let me.
(Source.)
The Readyunmades of Phil Wagner. Phil Wagner's recent work deepens his exploration in assemblage, a peculiar kind of composition of found objects which in Wagner's hands luminously reflect his many years of prior commitment to the practice of painting. Following a long tradition of artists who source their materials from depleted furniture and debris cast off for the trash collector on the street, he repositions these elements along multiple axis and joins the various fragments with a light touch to form a three dimensional, highly formal experience inevitably redolent with rich allusions to painting.
Beuys, Rauschenberg, Duchamp, three artists repeatedly referred to in conversation with Wagner about his recent work. How can these paragons of art history make sense other than a random collection of referents, what story can be told with such characters in play? If we consider here that the career trajectory of Phil Wagner thus far has taken him from the tradition of painting towards assemblage, it might be possible to view his current work as in a productive tension with his past. It is possible to imagine that he is looking through frames within frames backwards through a history which is inevitably postmodern, towards the bedrock of his experience as an accomplished painter. If the history of art has a trajectory from the modern to the postmodern, then this path can be retraced, it can be renegotiated backwards. It is as if Phil Wagner is driving the vehicle of his art practice in reverse. And since no emerging artist today can reasonably choose to be reactionary, imagine him instead as a driver in a typical Demolition Derby from the American heartland, navigating not through his windshield but through his rear view mirror, transmission in reverse, ramming targets with the less vulnerable rear end of his vehicle.
The entirety of the history of contemporary art is postmodern, and it is typical for many to make sense of this long chapter as a formless one, as a series of unrelated events. What if our postmodern era that has a grain to it instead? Consider if you will, the convention that the postmodern era was born with the work of Marcel Duchamp and bloomed just at the moment when the high modernism of New York's Abstract Expressionists died. As the work of Rothko, Pollock, De Kooning and others reached a zenith, their transcendent mission to touch G-d through material means reached the summit of it's possibility. Young artists at the time, Warhol, Rauschenberg, Ruscha et al., knowing that little more could be done in this direction, reversed course and flipped the paradigm: instead of touching G-d through material means, the then-new-generation touched everyday life through conceptual means. From the moment of this inception spun in succession: Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Critical Theory, the overtly political, and through to today with what can be called CEO artists such as Hirst, Murakami and Pardo, all artists of the deal, inspired obliquely perhaps by Donald Trump himself. References to everyday life via conceptual means is precisely what the CEO artists do, a fitting additional chapter recent to the legacy of postmodernism.
Like the then-new-generation of artists of the late 50's, there is perhaps with the work of emerging artists such as Phil Wagner, a recognition that the big bang of the postmodern era has eventually dissipated entropically into a hiss of background radiation. What to do at the end of history when the subsequent formula for sea change has yet to present itself? An artist could either passively wait for the tide of history to shift... or scavenge history much like Wagner scavenges the street for the things that satisfy his intuition. What we have here is a comprehensible tale that paints a pattern to the postmodern epoch and with this roadmap let us imagine the driver, Phil Wagner, helmeted in his derby racer, aiming his vehicle through his rear view mirror, pedal to the metal, intending to crash through several frames of reference in art history.
What to do at the end of history when the subsequent paradigm shift has yet to present itself? Fix your target in the rear view mirror, palm the head of the stick shift into reverse and stomp on the accelerator. The first targeted frame is the West Coast tradition of assemblage artists such as Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner and Edward Kienholz, artists born to the working class and as such have a common affinity for the pragmatic aspects of materiality, seriality, consumption and production. The acceleration and impact continues through a subsequent sequence of frames: the intuition and eclecticism of Beuys; the clear and certain formalism of the specific objects of Donald Judd; the "gap between art and life" of Rauschenberg; splitting the Abstract Expressionists; and finally impacting Marcel Duchamp with enough force as to effect a kind of Readyunmade in that the selected mass produced consumer object/material is that which is first used and then wasted by society. This is the Readyunmade, composed of consumed, consumer objects. Readyunmade materials reverses the legendary argument of the "antidote to retinal art" of Duchamp, instead filling the retina with the rich materiality found between art and life, with intense and exact formalism, with choices guided by presentiment, with the solid, rooted earthiness of the MidWest.
More than simply worn to patina and reduced to shards and fragments, his materials have been degraded through the wringer of consumer culture. Society became his brush in motion as consumed, consumer objects replaced paint and history became canvas. Society became the scumbler, became the brush loaded by the products of our advanced industrial revolution, spent on the surface of the 21st century. If in painting, the force of entropy is measured from the mix of colors once pure then blended towards mud; then in this kind of assemblage, there might be a kind of reverse entropy in Wagner's work that moves from rescued detritus to a refined formalism of balance and visual wholeness that suggests perfection.
?don?t come crying to me.
Bruce Mau bucks up the troops, drill sergeant style:
If you are an architect and are thinking any thought other than, ?Hey, this is awesome! This is the craziest, coolest, most beautiful time in human history to be alive and working;? if you aren?t saying, ?Wow! I get to constantly learn new things, and everything is uncertain. I want everyone on the planet to get in on the action and be part of this new world of invention and beauty!??I don?t want to hear it. If you are thinking a complaint, just stop. If your thought sounds whiny or rhymes with ?woe is me? or has a mildly racist undertone about people ?over there? taking ?our? jobs?I don?t want to hear it. If you can?t tell the difference between critical and negative, and have conflated the two and built a practice around ?challenging? this or that, and are wondering why people aren?t interested?don?t come crying to me.Sounds like this is a cousin of the double rainbow.However, if you have woken up and realized that the internal monologue and obsession with policing the boundary of ?big A? licensed Architecture means that architects could lose the thread of the most important movement in history, the movement to redesign the world and everything we do to sustainably meet the needs of the 4.5 billion children who will be born before midcentury, then do something about it. If you realize your colleagues have been so busy policing the fence of exclusivity that they forgot to open the door of possibility, then get in the game. If you understand that the practice of architecture?the practice of synthesis that generates coherent unity from massively complex and diverse inputs?just might be the operating system that we need to solve the challenges that we face in meeting the needs of the next generation, then join the movement. If you get the fact that architecture, and the design methodologies at its core, could be central to the future of cities, governments, ecologies, and businesses, then please raise your voice in the chorus of potential. Get into the discussion and leave your worries about the fence that separates you from the rest of the world behind you. Stop the complaining?and join the revolution of possibility.
More command encouragement here.
P.S.: Architects are a bit hamstrung by the same responsibility doctors have. First, do no harm. Artists have a downstroke into the mean streets of human existence, transgression and rebellion are the most important items in the tool kit.
Collective Show
We're going to have a show here in ChinaTown that seems to resemble a pocket art fair. The opening is tomorrow night and they will have a round table discussion this Saturday, 2-4pm. That should be interesting. How did they self organize? What do they think of the history of group based art collaboratives? What contemporary issues have an impact on their practice? What does the "collective" mean today? How do they position themselves politically, or is this a moot point? How hard or how easy is it to collaborate? How do they deal with differences? Why is this important for art? Is art better made this way? How is a collective different from normative circles of friendship?
COLLECTIVE SHOW LOS ANGELES
Collective Show is pleased to present ?Collective Show Los Angeles 2011,? an artist-organized exhibition of contemporary art groups recently established in Los Angeles. This collaboratively curated ?group show of group shows? features artist-run spaces and projects formed in the past five years. Over 20 groups will exhibit artwork, publications and posters during the show at a newly renovated space in Chinatown. Screenings, performances and talks will take place during the exhibition. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition and PDFs will be available online after the show.COLLECTIVE SHOW LOS ANGELES 2011
LOS ANGELES 2011 PARTICIPATING GROUPS
LOCATION 995, 997 North Hill Street Los Angeles CA 90012
RECEPTION Thursday, January 20, 2011, 6-9pm
EXHIBITION Friday through Sunday, January 21-23, 2011, 12-6 pm & Thursday through Sunday, January 27-30, 2011, 12-6 pm
PERFORMANCES TBA
323 Projects, Actual Size Los Angeles, Adrian Piper Gallery, ART2102 of Los Angeles, ACP (Artist Curated Projects), CANAL, Commonwealth and Council, CUBO, Dan Graham, Darin Klein & Friends, Eighteen Thirty Collaborations (ETC), Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 *particle group* b.a.n.g. lab, Elephant, The Elysian Park Museum of Art, Eternal Telethon, Human Resources, JMOCA (Justin's Museum of Contemporary Art), LA Pedestrians, Los Angeles Road Concerts, MATERIAL, Monte Vista, [name], NIGHT GALLERY, Open Arms, Public Address, Public Fiction, The Public School, Silvershed, Statler Waldorf Gallery, Summercamp's Projectproject, Workspace, WPA, and upcoming Collective Show hosts: Ditch Projects (Oregon) GIBSMIR-Family (Zurich) and Secondhome Projects (Berlin).
Double Affect
I'm listening to Bad at Sports' EPISODE 267: JAMES ELKINS AND THE STONE SUMMER THEORY INSTITUTE. About 48 minutes into a brief on current trends in theory, he referred to this video and the one below. Interesting, funny stuff.
Also, if you want a little more extensive brief that sweeps nearly all of modern and contemporary art in terms of movements of theory, you might want to read Martha Rosler's
Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-critical Art ?Survive??.
P.S. Here's another:
Untitled from VJ Peter Rand on Vimeo.
January 17, 2011
January 14, 2011
Will Cotton at Michael Kohn Gallery Tonight
We get to meet Will Cotton tonight. Here is a snip from the press release:
For his new work Cotton has designed items of clothing specifically for the fictional space that the characters inhabit. He created a dress based on a foil cupcake wrapper, as well as one actually composed of cupcake papers, a skirt made of cotton candy with a rock candy bodice, cake hats, and candy tiaras; all worn by the models as they posed for the paintings. This body of work merges portraiture, landscape painting, decadent fashion, and Cotton?s interest in the role of bodily decoration as a signifier of status and taste.(Videos below the fold...)While in the past, Cotton has seen his figures as representative of a generalized archetype so as to place greater emphasis on their utopian surroundings, this new body of work begins to explore more specific characters, with an interest in emotion and interior narrative. This coincided with the painting of recognizable pop figure, Katy Perry, who brought her own character and personality to the paintings (several of which will be included in this exhibition).
January 13, 2011
January 11, 2011
January 8, 2011
Ambient (Influences)
There has been much that's happened here at 510 Bernard Street that I haven't documented recently, BAD Dennis. The trouble is that I don't want to be a reporter of local goings around, but I do want this blog to record the passage of events/experiences and ideas that have some influence on my work, no matter how tenuous they might seem. The general idea is to absorb and generate content in my work so that it might seep or ooze or otherwise get secreted from my metaphorical pores. Here is a blog post to recover a few events here surrounding my studio, starting off with Tyler Vlahovich's show at WPA gallery back in November entitled I Drank the Kool Aid. Above, witness a panoramic shot of his install, a relatively spare show of white paintings, scratched with his characteristic line work. Below, a detail also a panoramic shot:
Tyler's work has prompted me to pull out my drawings and see if I can't get back into the rhythm again.
Dave Hughes had the subsequent show which was up for December, entitled UITOA, wherein he used the WPA in-house press to make, unmake a book, which then he used as art material as part of his installation. Other elements included assemblage or sculpture (an interesting conversation I would like to have with him sometime soon), which you can see if you click here... or you could just go the WPA website for proper documentation of the show.
Out in the hallway, there is a pocket gallery for 2nd Cannons Publications, helmed by Brian Kennon. From mid November to mid December, Patrick Hill showed his sculpture made from the detrius/tools of a print edition, the shot above was on the night of the install. Here is the intro from the 2nd Cannons website:
Hot and Dumb consists of an series of prints, a sculpture and a forthcoming book of the same title (to be published by 2nd Cannons). Using a selection of 40 wood remnants from his last 8 years of sculptural production, Hill has created a large print series by ?inking? each wood block with black urethane rubber and printing it onto hand-dyed, Japanese Masa rice paper. Each block has been printed in an edition of four, making a series of 160 editioned but unique prints. In it's Chinatown vitrine, 2nd Cannons will present Hot and Dumb (Cathedral), a sculpture consisting of the selected wood remnants used to make the print edition.
January 7, 2011
Let's Make Awesome Stuff
And now for some background and content:
The title of this post came from the video at time=0:48.
Most interesting parts:
Time= 1:15 "The long and the short of it is that record sales is not the metric for success in the music industry. The question is what the new model is, right? There's plenty of metrics for success, you could use FaceBook friends or fans or YouTube views or any of a million online yardsticks and the question is whether those line up with people's pocketbooks. And I basically think they can."
(Don't read an ellipsis here, because it gets better. Even so, skipping along...)
Time= 2:00 "Once there is a set path, there's toll collectors and gate keepers all along that path, and you have to wind up playing by the rules of the path to stay in the path, and right now you can forge your own a lot more easily than you could 5-10 years ago."
January 6, 2011
Freedom for South Sudan
(I figured that this kind of news needs a boost in the info-sphere. People don't seem too focused on it yet.)
Southern Sudan (officially known as the Government of Southern Sudan) is an autonomous region in Sudan. Juba is its capital city. It is bordered by Ethiopia to the east, Kenya, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the south, and the Central African Republic to the west. To the north lies the predominantly Arab and Muslim region directly under the control of the central government, with its capital at Khartoum. Southern Sudan includes the vast swamp region of the Sudd formed by the White Nile, locally called the Bahr el Jebel. The region's autonomous status is a condition of a peace agreement between the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) and the Government of Sudan represented by the National Congress Party ending the Second Sudanese Civil War. The conflict was Africa's longest running civil war. A referendum on independence for Southern Sudan is scheduled to be held on 9 January 2011.
(Background news here.)
January 3, 2011
Act 2, Scene 5
Music references in my art world is a index toward one's literacy, and it can be a tricky subject if you don't signal connoisseurship straight off the bat. I am certainly not literate in this regard, and I deflect stigma by delving into the micro fan worlds of my pals, asking for more information about what they are exploring, learning as much as I can along the way but knowing all the while that I am constitutionally incapable of sounding the depths that my friends have been long accustomed to. Much credit has to be assigned to this kind of fan scholarship, though. It is a positive reflex action of an art world that is cognizant that popular history often overlooks true talent and real history must be mined for the totality of aesthetic truth left behind by crude mill of fashion and market forces. Witness recuperative projects such as How to Draw a Bunny or the many exhibitions hosted by Mara McCarthy's gallery, The Box. Important work.
So when I mentioned to a friend recently that Teena Marie died, the name dropped a blank. I pulled up the video above with little effect, the music was too mainstream for him, emblematic as it was of elevator music and FM radio "Quiet Storm" pablum that is far too odious for refined taste to consider seriously. But, I protested, Teena Marie is the exact sort of artist that we celebrate: a singer of the first rank, a songwriter of few peers, a master of several instruments, a true talent eclipsed by her mentor Rick James, she struggled to escape the strictures of representation by her label and escaped victoriously, you can see in this video shot only months before her untimely death that she was the real thing despite the entropy of middle age, she commanded the stage effortlessly. Whatever I can write here will pale to the best testimonial I have ever seen in this video tribute by Lenny Kravitz:
There is something more that I like about her songwriting, it has to do with transitions and the juxtaposition of theme and tone.
In Casanova Brown, you can see it as she shifts the mood in the middle of the song:
everyone's there for the party
the hush turns to a shout
everyone's got a piece
of the pie
of you and I
but nobody knows when the lights go down
that the tears fall harder than the whole dam crowd
(And while we here, check out Sinatra's Vegas cabaret version, where even though he had dispensed with the intro, you can see how the guy could mesmerize with his blue eyes, despite the limitations of black and white film.)
I wish I could understand the Wikipedia entry on the song regarding song and harmonic structure. In Teena Marie's Casanova Brown video above, there are several shifts major and minor and the video is a shame in that it chops off the song a few fingers from the end. I've lead off with it here to show how powerful an artist she was in person. You'll have to poke around YouTube or download your own complete version to see what I mean about the way she ended the song. There is something about shifts in compositional structure, where the juxtaposition of dissimilar elements can enhance an overall project, that rivets my attention every time.
Happy New Year!
It's the first Monday of 2011, it's time to crank this blog up a bit.
Happy new year, everyone! This year has a good ring to it.