I recently found myself sitting on a couch in a dark room inside the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts at USC watching a play-test of a brand-new interactive video game. I use the term ‘interactive,’ because it was less like your typical Nintendo or PlayStation proceeding, and more akin to one of those ‘choose your own adventure’ movies, only digitalized, intricately detailed, and not a little influenced by the likes of Spielberg or Christopher Nolan. The game takes place in a slightly futuristic society, and at one point, the protagonist, a detective, is sitting in his beat-down, windowless office going over clues, when he puts on a pair of special sunglasses. These sunglasses allow him, and by proxy, us, the audience, to perceive his spacial environment as a pristine mountain-top, or a Redwood forest. The effect is novel, and provokes a round of ‘wouldn’t-that-be-cool’ comments from anybody who’s watching, yet it also brings up an interesting, modern phenomenon. I call it the ‘it’s not to you’ syndrome, and it works like this: you’re sitting in a beat-down, windowless office, but…it’s not to you.
Don’t get me wrong, this syndrome is hardly new or original, although it is intensifying in our digital age. And one person who’s exploring this intensification is artist Jeffrey Wells with his newest exhibit Seeing While Seeing at the Bergamont Station Arts Center, a part of the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Wells attempts to recreate the optical illusions of everyday life—the after-image of an exit sign, the undulating intersection of two vertical walls that meet at a right-angle—using video projections. Thus the viewer is left questioning whether or not an illusion is physical or digital. Both are percepts, separate from what some would call “objective reality,” but only one is an intentionally manipulated percept.
What Wells—along with the interactive video game, to a certain extent—may be attempting to illustrate is the danger of the ‘it’s not to you’ syndrome. Because how do you really know what is? Or who’s presenting what to you, for that matter? And as the line between what is and what is to you gets smaller and smaller, what becomes of you?
Jeffrey Wells’s Seeing While Seeing is on view until April 17th at Project Room 1 in the Bergamont Station Arts Center, a part of the Santa Monica Museum of Arts. Bergamont Station is located at 2525 Michigan Ave, Building G-1. For more information, please call (310) 586-6488, or visit www.smmoa.org.
The job of a film archivist is a relatively new one. It sounds silly. (If my friend Pete has a massive DVD collection, is he suddenly considered an archivist?) But what a lot of people don’t know is that film is a kind of living organism. It decays quite rapidly over time. And as depicted so graphically in the latest Tarantino venture, Inglorious Basterds, most of the movies made in the silent-era were shot on an ultra-flammable cellulose nitrate film base. Due to this highly unstable stock, as well as the recklessness of early studio storage, a great many of the films made in America before 1920 are either lost, or have turned to dust. In fact, no type of truly durable film base was even introduced into the movie-making landscape until the early 1990’s with the popularization of polyester.
Enter the heroic film archivist, whose job it is to preserve the ever-growing, ever-decaying amount of film stock from the grips of its natural demise. Mark Toscano of the Academy Film Archive is one of these heroes, who most recently co-curated the REDCAT screening of Now You Can Do Anything: The Films of Chris Langdon. This series of fourteen short, experimental films were all made within the period of two years, from 1973 to 1975, and would have easily been lost were it not for the efforts of people like Mark Toscano and fellow filmmaker/Angeleno, Thom Andersen.
Yet Langdon’s shorts, interestingly enough, seemed to work in spite of preservation. The magic was in her apparent disregard for such preciousness. Her film “Bondage Boy,” for instance, featured 16mm shots of a guy in a basement dressed in a woman’s slip and bound with ropes in various positions, all to the soundtrack of an uppity 1950’s swing tune. “Picasso,” another one of Langdon’s works, was, in her words, “the first post-mortem documentary” of the famous painter, fully completed in four hours for a little under $5.
Langdon, who was present at the screening, addressed the audience afterwards. And it was clear that her main motivation behind the 83 minutes of film we had all just sat through was simply to film something. One piece was a joke, another was a bet, and one was just to get over the plain fear of wasting money through a camera. In a sense, she was fueling the need for future experimental film archivists like Mark Toscano. Because without artists with the courage to waste film, why would you need someone to preserve what’s special about it?
The Redcat is located Downtown at the Roy and Edna Disney/Calarts Theater in the Walt Disney Concert Hall. For information about upcoming screenings and performances, please visitwww.redcat.org, or call (213) 237-2800.
This year, the Los Angeles Art Show made its home at Los Angeles Convention Center. This venue change provided more space for gallery booths that ranged from contemporary works such as the Wall Project’s Shepard Fairey and Thierry Noir painted walls to landscapes galore — and even more space for project-based installations. The Vox Humana on-site art performance presented street artists Mear One, Kofie, Retna, and El Mac who showed off their talents over the length of the fair on large-scale canvases. And speaking of more room, I wondered how Sidestreet Projects got one of their woodworking workshop buses into the fair. These school buses are outfitted with project stations for elementary school children so they can make a nuts and bolts washer sandwich and one FUNdred dollar bills, which I am sure we all could use more of these days.
One of my favorite pieces of the art fair was Pablo Uribe’s video, Atardecer (2008), which screened in a makeshift dark room in the Guest Country program booth’s rear. While looking at the other works from the 34° 53’ 0” S – 56° 10’ 0” W show, I heard animals sounds curiously mix with the ambient art fair noise. Upon stepping into the screening area, there was a video of an older man standing before a black background looking as if he were about to perform a gorgeous aria. Instead of sweet notes pouring out of his mouth, the sound of a dog’s bark came out. And then the cooing of a bird! The actor was imitating the sounds of native rain forest animals.
Willy Rojas, Egg
Willy Rojas’ photographs at Barcelona’s Villa del Arte booth depicted miniature figurines interacting with their food-based environment. Tiny people ski down slopes of salt or a wedge of hard cheese. A man broke the shell of an egg with his sledgehammer while a couple ice skates on an orange hued soup.
Speaking of food, the Timothy Yarger Gallery presented Jean Wells’ The Giant Kiss quite literally. The huge chocolate-scented foil wrapped sculpture demanded a tongue-in-cheek presence while paying homage to Claes Oldenburg’s shop.
The Rebecca Hossack Gallery held quite a few treats, including a gorgeous papel picado-esque paper cutting in the shape of a peacock (Ian Penney), a piece of toast with an image of Shakespeare burnt onto it à la the Virgen de Guadalupe (Maria Morrow), and also Phil Shaw’s photographs of brightly colored bookshelves, which was a voyeur’s delight to snoop the book titles.
And on my way out, I spotted three Jeff Koon’s puppy vases filled with fresh flowers guarding Jean Dubuffet’s Tapis at the Jane Kahan Gallery. In my mind, they were the guardians of the LA Art Show — a much friendlier and kitsch version of Cerberus.
Yesterday, I journeyed to the center of the Earth. And by the center of the Earth, I mean Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, an exhibition at the Fowler Museum. The whole experience wasn’t too strenuous and it provided a welcomed break and plenty of inspiration into my day.
Upon entrance, there is a huge bear made out of striped sweaters standing on its hind legs. Welcome to the show, ladies and gentlemen. Your journey has just begun. In the same room, a three-panel screen showing different videos sets the tone of the show because they depict Nick Cave’s Soundsuits in resonating action. Soundsuits are elaborate, labor-intensive costumes, or “suits,” made out of household materials. The name of each suit is the sound each costume makes when worn.
Marching straight out of a hallucination, the 35 Soundsuits on display boggle the mind because they are part ritualistic garb and part Alice in Wonderland with a touch of Liberace. They range from knitted bodysuits patched together from afghans to intricate headdresses turned body-based sculpture covered with sequins and video tape. Considering the sculptures are to be worn, one can start to think about the notions of performance whether in terms of art, ritual, or art and ritual’s intersection. Furthermore, just imagine wearing one of these suits. Not only would you need a team to help you put it on, but also you would need to relearn how to move and learn how to be this character. There is only room for one personality when wearing a Soundsuit. And I think the Soundsuit would win.
A close inspection of the suits’ materials dazzle the mind. Materials include remnants of cozy sweaters, sequin jackets, kitsch bird sculptures, vintage toy tops, and buttons galore all stacked on top of each other or sewn right next to each other. You start to wonder about the life of each material before it was placed onto this sculpture. Each button was once sewn onto a shirt. Each afghan warmed families on their couch. The sheer amount of found materials is astounding.
Furthermore, the show’s installation was a treat. Instead of following the works-on-white-wall model, brilliantly colored walls and screens lead the viewer throughout the exhibition Wild Toad-style to examine the Soundsuits in the round.
As you walk out of the exhibition, you might be wondering where you could see one of these Soundsuits in action. If you keep your eyes and ears open, you will. Nick Cave is partnering up with UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures to create a series of impromptu performance-interventions around the city called Soundsuit Invasions. Just keep tabs on the Fowler’s Twitter and Facebook feeds for the details.
Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth closes May 30, 2010. Please click here for more information.
Madonna said it well. Everyone wants to know what it feels like for a girl… Now, at New Image Art gallery in West Hollywood, you can get that much closer to figuring out what life must be like on Venus. Called Put Your Finger On The Button: Women Photographers, their current exhibit is a group show featuring fourteen photographers who’ve covered a respectable amount of ground with cameras in hand.
On now through February 6, 2010, the show’s underlying theme isn’t necessarily the content, although many images feature somewhat haunting faces of women in varying states of disarray. The message of the show is more focused on revealing what it is these women saw, how they present their subjects, and then what that all says about women in general – if anything. Jeaneen Lund’s haunting image of a woman in fishnet stockings, character shoes, and some kind of lacy black ensemble, for example, is significantly less sexy than it sounds – its really more sad. Then, Lauren Dukoff’s image makes you want to play “Put Your Records On,” by Corinne Bailey Rae while Rebecca Wright’s photo basically says “potty training doesn’t have to be so complicated.” It’s Alma Carmina Marquez’ photo of a black cat in front of a TV on the side of the street that speaks volumes in just an instant. According to suspicion, you should never cross the path of a black cat. Similarly women, often associated with the feline nature of cats, shouldn’t be crossed. Don’t forget it.
In typical female fashion, that the photographs don’t all cover the same subject matter just shows how adept we are at multi-tasking.
Fuel up your car and pack some snacks because come this weekend, you will be zipping around Los Angeles to stay on the pulse of the art scene. It may be easier said than done, but you can be the judge of that…
Start your Saturday at the Honor Fraser Gallery in Culver City with a panel titled “Pop Art and Ethics,” which will be moderated by Ed Schad and include Irving Blum, David LaChapelle, Holly Myers, and Catherine Taft. This discussion will explore what makes pop continually vital, continually hated, and perhaps a state of art practice that will always exist. If you have two or three cents, be sure to throw them in. [Panel is Saturday, December 12 at 2:00. Click here for more info.]
Over at Regen Projects in West Hollywood, Glenn Ligon’s new exhibition Off Books is made up of paintings that continue Ligon’s study of James Baldwin’s seminal 1953 essay Stranger in the Village. Ligon’s work focuses on themes found within this text, including cultural identity, the decipherability of the other, and the burden of history. [Opening reception is Saturday, December 12, 6 – 8pm. Click here for more info.]
Grab a drink at the Mountain Bar as you continue the adventure in Chinatown. The doors for Chinatown galleries will be wide open during Chinatown Art Nights. At FOCA, the exhibition All Time Greatest, curated by Natilee Harren, explores how an artist’s musical tastes add another dimension to his or her work. We are hoping to find someone’s guilty musical pleasure. Beyoncé, anyone? [Opening reception is Saturday, December 12, 7 – 9 pm. Click here for more info.]
Continuing northward, in Highland Park, workspace is playing it digital in “Let’s Pretend This Never Happened,” curated by Graham Kolbeins, which features a looped screening of videos. These films explore reviving and exorcising the recent past. [Event is Saturday, December 12, 7 – 10pm. Click here for more info.]
If you are still on your art high from Saturday, swing by MOCA to watch Herb & Dorothy on Sunday. This film features a couple, a postal clerk and librarian, who amassed one of the most important collections of contemporary art by buying art work “we liked, what we could afford, and what would fit in our one-bedroom apartment.” [Film is Sunday, December 13, 3–5pm. Click here for more info.]
Those are the rounds to be made. It’s a hard job, but someone’s got to do it.
After days of exclusive parties and bad food, the art fair circuit in Miami is winding down. Everyone has two cents about this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, especially with Michael Jackson’s surprise appearance. Yet somehow the world goes on outside of Miami…
Galleries from across the globe have congregated in one spot for one weekend. Word is they are doing more with more in Miami. Linda Yablonsky gives her first impression of the fair. [New York Times]
Art Basel Miami Beach has bigger works and smaller prices… “When markets contract, art fairs shrink — but only to a point.” [The LA Times]
There are stronger art sales at Basel than last year. “As well as taking longer to complete, sales are happening at a different level. ‘The numbers have all changed, 500,000 is the new million,’ says 303 director Lisa Spellman.” [The Art Newspaper]
This is an art fair favorite. At PULSE, “Corner Store envelopes the visitor within the environment of a gas station or convenience store typical to Texas and the Southern United States.” It is a Kwik-E-Mart for the art world. [Daily Serving]
Michael Jackson strikes back. Artist Kehinde Wiley reveals a portrait of Jackson a la Rubens commissioned before Jackson’s death. It is showing at Deitch Projects. [The Art Newspaper]
David Hockney zips between Los Angeles and Yorkshire, England and tells what it is like being an “English Los Angeleno.” [The LA Times]
MOMA presents a retrospective of Tim Burton. Will it include Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter as well? [New York Times]
The strike of Paris museum workers, which began recently at the Centre Pompidou, has spread to the Musee d’Orsay, the Arc de Triomphe, the Sainte-Chapelle, the Carcassonne in the south of France, Versailles Palace, and the Louvre. The Louvre was able to open a number of its rooms for a very limited amount of time this week, but that is not necessarily a harbinger of good news – the protesters say they will “keep going until they give in.” [Bloomberg]
Eli Broad makes very clear why he loves LA in this top ten list… Listen up, New York. [Huffington Post]
You’ve tried time and again to get all your favorite artists together under one roof. The dinner parties are a mess – one artist is a macrobiotic vegan, another shows up three hours late, and they all chain smoke so much that your house smells like a pool hall.
Okay, so maybe we’re generalizing, but it can be hard to fit more than one artist in a room.
Not for Warren Brand and BOXeight Studios, it seems. Friday night, November 13, they’re hosting ARTBOX at their downtown space that will combine the work of so many artists we literally can’t list them. Some of them include David Flores, Crash, Augustine Kofie, Kelly Vivanco, Thomas Han, and like we said, too many others. But you can rest assured that the work you’ll see spans a host of genres and styles like street art, photography, and even a painting demonstration. Featuring a large collection of both emerging and established artists, ARTBOX comes at just the right time to discover your new favorite artist – now you’ll know what to say when someone asks what to get you for the holidays.
Harder than fitting this many artists in one room is packing them in without some unparalleled hip-hop of the old school persuasion to drown out their ‘revolutionary’ chatter (we jest out of love). That’s why the boys and girls at BOXeight have come through with Biz Markie as Friday night’s DJ. You can thank him for getting you out of a conversation about the beauty of spilt milk on pavement and for asking if s/he is really just a friend. He’s got what you need.
Considering you rarely go anywhere without us, you’ll find team Fine Arts LA taking photos to capture all the action – come visit us! We promise not to wax-poetic.
ARTBOX atBOXeight studiosis Friday, November 13 from 7pm. For more information, please click here. Hope to see you there!
I know most of you shy away from the cold, hard world of science, but unfortunately, there are some scientific laws you just can’t escape. Einstein and Newton had a few up their sleeves. Throw in quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and chemistry, and you’re not speaking my language anymore. But nevertheless, you have experienced cause and effect in full force. For every action, there is a reaction (i.e. for every glass of wine you drink, there will be stronger consequences later in the evening — usually drunk dialing, texting, emailing, and/or facebooking). Cause and effect is a nasty fact, but imagine learning about this law of science in a venue that is much more comfortable for you art lovers: the gallery.
In the form of a group exhibition, LM Projects explores the theme of cause and effect by gathering the work of six artists — Nova Jiang, Len Lye, Robert Rauschenberg, Jacob Tonski, and Peter Fischli & David Weiss – that have the commonality of mechanical, temporal, and movement-based components. Cause and Effect provides a nice change from the usual work-on-the-wall shows you are used to, as it is mostly comprised of video-based performances and kinetic sculpture from the mid-1960s to the present.
After seeing this exhibition, heed warning and don’t bee a victim of cause and effect this Halloween. Please ask your best friend to hide your iPhone before you head out.
Cause and Effect closes at LM Projects November 14th. For more information about this exhibition, please click here.
When sitting at your desk most days, you need something extra to accompany Solitaire or Minesweeper because Text Twist just isn’t cutting it anymore. What about a classic blast from the past: the Oregon Trail.
Making that move from East Coast to Left Coast not only gave us a 19th century American history lesson, but also taught us dysentery isn’t all that is cracked up to be. Never fear, spotting those bison, deer, and rabbits (and getting a little shooting practice) only prepared us for the realization that as those pioneers were making a fresh trek west, they were trekking right through the wild west’s fauna and their natural habitats. In a new exhibition at Regen Projects, artist Doug Aitken gives us a clue on what these animals would do if they were in our homes – or at least in our hotels.
Doug Aitken screens migration, the first installment of a three film series entitled empire. Wild animals pass through empty hotel rooms paralleling a migratory journey north to south. And while some animals seem so awkward in their unnatural surroundings, it is startling how at home some of these animals are! Thankfully, foxes know hardly anything about pay-per-view.
This film is screened onto the courtyard of Regen Projects II (9016 Santa Monica Blvd.) visible only from sunset to sunrise. During the day, this film is shown at Regen Projects (633 Almont Dr.) on an indoor billboard. migration is shown alongside several of Aitken’s light boxes that utilize photographic collage and text.
Beware of the bison, especially when it meets room service.
Doug Aitken’s work will be shown through October 17 at Regen Projects and Regen Projects II. For more information, please call (310) 276-5424 or clickhere.
The job of a film archivist is a relatively new one. It sounds silly. (If my friend Pete has a massive DVD collection, is he suddenly considered an archivist?) But what a lot of people don’t know is that film is a kind of living organism. It decays quite rapidly over time. And as depicted so graphically in the latest Tarantino venture, Inglorious Basterds, most of the movies made in the silent-era were shot on an ultra-flammable cellulose nitrate film base. Due to this highly unstable stock, as well as the recklessness of early studio storage, a great many of the films made in America before 1920 are either lost, or have turned to dust. In fact, no type of truly durable film base was even introduced into the movie-making landscape until the early 1990’s with the popularization of polyester.
Yesterday, I journeyed to the center of the Earth. And by the center of the Earth, I mean Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, an exhibition at the Fowler Museum. The whole experience wasn’t too strenuous and it provided a welcomed break and plenty of inspiration into my day.
Madonna said it well. Everyone wants to know what it feels like for a girl… 
Fuel up your car and pack some snacks because come this weekend, you will be zipping around Los Angeles to stay on the pulse of the art scene. It may be easier said than done, but you can be the judge of that…
I know most of you shy away from the cold, hard world of science, but unfortunately, there are some scientific laws you just can’t escape. Einstein and Newton had a few up their sleeves. Throw in quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and chemistry, and you’re not speaking my language anymore. But nevertheless, you have experienced cause and effect in full force. For every action, there is a reaction (i.e. for every glass of wine you drink, there will be stronger consequences later in the evening — usually drunk dialing, texting, emailing, and/or facebooking). Cause and effect is a nasty fact, but imagine learning about this law of science in a venue that is much more comfortable for you art lovers: the gallery.
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