There are some pairings in film that conjure eye rolls and looks of confusion. There are still others that are so perfectly crafted, they practically create a new era of film in and of themselves. Cue Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. That their first film together, Flying Down to Rio (1933), was a Hollywood-style happy accident was more fortuitous than producers and audiences could imagine. From that film onwards, they delighted audiences with their charm, chemistry, and dancing style.
Astaire, 12 years her senior, offered Rogers a cigarette in The Gay Divorcee (1935) with his sly smile and a song in mind, “Night and Day.” Dance numbers between the two range from vivacious, Vegas-style spectaculars to intimate, two-on-two turns on an impromptu dance floor. Their costumes ranged from gowns and coattails to slacks and blazers just as their styles ran the gamut from sweet and silly dancing to dramatic sweeps across the floor.
In celebration of the romantic duo’s 75th Anniversary, the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood will host a double feature of two of their most memorable turns on the silver screen – Top Hat (1935) and Roberta (1935). The first is a comic look at what happens when, simply put, Astaire tries to impress Rogers with his good looks and dance moves during a show they’re both working on in London. The latter sees them tapping their toes in Paris where Astaire, leader of a band in need of a gig, gets help from his old girlfriend, Rogers.
The rumor that mulls around American musical lovers is that Ginger Rogers really wasn’t a great dancer in her own right. It’s that Astaire was such a professional, he made her look like queen of the dance floor. (I mean, he has danced with a coat rack.) No one really knows if that’s true, but if you think about it, it’s a sweet rumor – they were more together than they were alone. Swoon.
The double feature of Top Hat and Roberta at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood is on view this Sunday, March 14 from 7:30pm. For more information, please call (323) 466-3456 or click here.
Right now my brain thinking of a way to describe this new-age, medical concept while sending signals to the muscles in my fingers in order to type out, letter by letter, the words and eventual sentences to communicate this notion to an imagined, future audience. Oh, and I’m hungry. That’s Mindful Awareness: the “moment-by-moment process of actively and openly observing one’s physical, mental and emotional experiences.”
To hear more specific information about the proven health benefits of such exercises, as well as how to do them, head to the Hammer Museum at 12:30 PM this Thursday for their free weekly “drop in” session. Leading the discussion is the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center’s Director of Mindfulness Education, Diana Winston, alongside Dr. Marvin Belzer, an expert practitioner of Mindful Awareness.
Well, Gesamtkunstwerk, pronounced ‘guess-amt-kunst-verk,’ is a term made famous by German composer, conductor, director, anti-Semite, and writer Wilhelm Richard Wagner, and it’s usually translated to mean “total artwork.” Wagner, in all his “Ride of the Valkyries” gusto, had a vision of a kind of ‘future art,’ in which the end-result would be a synthesis for every art-form known to man (i.e. music, performance, drama, architecture, poetry, etc.). It’s debatable whether or not Wagner actually achieved a true Gesamtkunstwerk in his work, but his deep influence and brilliance as a composer/writer of opera is hard to match, let alone perform.
At 7:00 PM on Thursday night at the Hammer Museum, Wagnerian singers Linda Watson and John Treleavan of the on-going Ring Festival LA (an enormous cultural compilation of lectures, exhibitions, shows, and conferences revolving around the first-ever Los Angeles performance of Wagner’s four-opera masterpiece, The Ring of the Nibelung) will discuss the intricacies of belting out complex tonal and chromatic changes, while still remaining a simple piece of the overall Gesamtkunstwerk.
What is the connection? And why would you attend both lectures?
Besides the obvious similarity in setting, there does seem to be a thematic crossover between these two programs. Both attempt to explain the whole in terms of its parts, and those parts in terms of their smaller parts, and so on. This mode of thinking assumes there’s a greater organism at work, spinning wheels inside wheels, and what better way to get lost inside these rotations than to spend a day at the Hammer? Either that, or write an opera.
“Mindful Awareness” starts at 12:30 PM on Thursday, March 11. “Ring Festival: The Challenges of Singing Wagner” begins at 7:00 PM. Both programs are free of admission, and take place at The Hammer Museum, located at 10899 Wilshire Blvd. For more information, please call (310) 433-7000, or visit hammer.ucla.edu.
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens and LACMA are both about to come into a little bit of an inheritance. The private collection of Sidney and Frances Lasker Brody, which is filled to the brim with enviable works, will go up for auction at Christie’s in May. According to the LA Times’ Culture Monster, The Huntington is set to get a share of the upcoming sale, while LACMA will be the lucky recipient of a 12-by-11-foot mural that the Brody’s commissioned from Matisse. Go back. Read that again. They commissioned a mural, called “La Garde,” from Matisse.
The Brody’s served on both museum boards and their collection and their house are both points of pride for art and architecture lovers in Los Angeles. Christie’s has estimated that the sale will garner $150 million especially considering that they’ll be auctioning off works by Picasso, Giacometti, Braque, and Degas.
Click here, or here, to read more about it. Wonder if we can afford anything up for auction!
A while ago, we posted an article asking what you, dear readers, thought about the distinction between art and vandalism. Skating the line, with a very charged political message, is British street artist D*Face who has installed two enormous and menacing Oscar statues atop two iconic LA locations: Runyon Canyon and Mel’s Drive-In in Hollywood. Both statues have skeleton-like figures with bits of flesh missing from their arms and legs exposing Oscar’s blood and bones. The one that sat at Runyon had a placard that read “Beauty Is One Snip Away,” while the other at Mel’s Drive-In said “Beauty Is Skin Deep.” They’ve both been removed since they were spotted yesterday morning, but the whole incident begs a whole host of questions, not least of which is: really? Mel’s Drive-In? We get Runyon Canyon, but that’s a strange choice.
More importantly, what do you think of all this? The two most basic sides must be: applause to D*Face for exposing a vanity-obsessed culture at a time when it’s at its most self-congratulatory vs. how petulant of this artist to criticize a sector of popular culture that he need not participate in if he finds it so disheartening.
The last time the Dirty Projectors played in Los Angeles was on Halloween at the Jensen Recreation Center in Echo Park, where frontman David Longstreth wore a ten-gallon foam cowboy hat and his upside-down guitar with the confidence of a newly minted visionary. Fans of the Projectors’ odd, brilliant, shimmering music had been waiting for the band to play at Disney Hall since November, anticipating their breakout hit, 2009’s Bitte Orca, amplified by a lush string section.
But on Saturday night, Longstreth looked small and befuddled on the Disney Hall stage, fiddling with the tuning of his guitars for a half an hour during intermission. Longstreth is 28, with the refractory brain of a brilliant twelve-year-old with attention deficit disorder and the composing abilities of Mozart on mushrooms in Africa. After Saturday night, the audience learned his musical influences include Ligeti, Wagner, Ravel, and Don Henley.
Don Henley might seem like an odd choice. The program notes include an earnest letter Longstreth sent Henley in 2005, accompanying a free copy of The Getty Address, Longstreth’s 2005 opera about materialism, the homogenization of FM radio, and Sacagewea, or something like that. “I have included a copy of it here for you,” Longstreth wrote to Henley. “The album examines the question of what is wilderness in a world completely circumscribed by highways, once Manifest Destiny has no place to go- but in the end it is a love story.” Clearly, this makes sense to only one person: Longstreth himself.
The program was divided into three parts: the Philharmonic playing alone, the Projectors playing The Getty Address along with the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, and the Projectors playing alone. The program began with selections Longstreth hand-picked for the Philharmonic. Highlights included Ligeti’s Etude No. 13, played by gray-haired John Orge, who lingered on the piano keys after the last high notes for a long, indulgent silence, and Ravel’s beautifully orchestrated Mother Goose Suite. After a long intermission, the Projectors emerged, wearing color-coordinated hooded jackets, to play The Getty Address in its entirety. And here is where the problems began.
Truthfully, the opera is an indulgent college project from a very, very talented student, with glimpses of the Projectors’ current, much more successful musical incarnation nestled in like raisins studded into a very wobbly gray oatmeal. In the first song (er, movement), “I Sit on the Ridge at Dusk,” the beat kicked in, and the Projectorettes (Amber Coffman, Haley Dekle, and Angel Deradoorian) wailed “got a world of trouble on my mind,” in an indistinct language, moving very slightly from side to side, like shy sirens. But momentum was lost on the second song, and the album is so complex, the time signatures so twisted, it seemed that no amount of practice could have nailed it down. It didn’t help that Alarm Will Sound had some spotty synchronicity and tuning moments. The long, drifting passages on “But in the Headlights” and “Gilt Gold Scabs” sounded misguided and naked, as though a player were missing. Some members played on wine bottles, and a base flute was involved, as well as lots of gratuitous hand-clapping, which sounded messy at times, perhaps on purpose. Many in the audience began to get restless, but the ensemble soldiered on to no avail.
After the opera finally ended, the Projectors (minus their drummer) took the stage for three songs: a very slow cover of Dylan’s “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” as well as their own “Temecula Sunrise” and “Cannibal Resource” from Bitte Orca. They sounded good, and Longstreth’s singing sounded much more comfortable, but the band would have sounded much better with a whole orchestra backing them up. None of the women got to sing lead on any song, though Angel Deradoorian singing “Two Doves” would have sounded lovely in this acoustic setting.
All in all, the event demonstrated what the Projectors are capable of musically. It also showed that some misguided musical experiments are better laid to rest, no matter how brilliant their 23-year-old composer may be. As the Eagles said, “And I don’t want to hear any more/ No, no, baby/ I don’t want to hear any more.” Here’s hoping the Projectors stick to Bitte Orca from now on.
The Walt Disney Concert Hall is located at 111 South Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles. For more information on upcoming shows, please call (213) 972-7211, or visit www.laphil.com.
Ever wonder what happened to Ed Templeton? That professional skateboarder turned internationally renowned artist, photographer, D.I.Y. innovator, entrepreneur, ‘Beautiful Loser,’ and book publisher? Well if you haven’t, then Ed Templeton has.
His eclectic career as both a skater and an artist has always seemed to be about his own relationship to time and motion. In his famous photography book, Teenage Smokers, for instance, each medium to close-up image of a young person with a cigarette has the feeling of personal impermanence, like a flash-memory of a kid you might have seen at the mall once when you were nine.
Templeton, especially in his most recent work, seems to be obsessed with these fragile, ephemeral moments, and what they might mean. His 2008 book, Deformer, which took him 11 years to complete, examines his youth growing up in the ultra-conservative suburban “incubator” of Orange County, using childhood letters, notes, photographs, sketches, and paintings to tell his story with as much physical accuracy as possible—even if it’s all long gone.
His latest photography show, The Seconds Pass, at the Roberts and Tilton Gallery in Culver City once again has Templeton on the move. These thirty-some separate collages of pictures, mostly all taken from the vantage point of a moving vehicle, attempt to capture exactly where he’s been these last few years, so as not to miss a passing second.
Ed Templeton’s The Seconds Pass can be viewed at the Roberts and Tilton Gallery in Culver City until April 3. Roberts and Tilton is located at 5801 Washinton Blvd. For more information, please call (323) 549-0223, or visit www.robertsandtilton.com.
When most people think of portraiture, images of aristocracy adorned in their finest medieval robes atop a crackling grand fireplace in some remote European castle probably come to mind. When I mention that I focused on 18th-19th Century portraiture in college, people look as if they’re about to fall asleep before I can finish the sentence. But this past Saturday, I attended a lecture at Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum presented by John Klein, Associate Professor from Washington University in St. Louis, that reminded me of the magnetism and presence of portraits. In his lecture, “Matisse, Picasso and Beyond: How Portraiture Survived Modernism,” he examined the means by which the art of human representation prevailed through an era defined by its antipathy to historical convention. Through the study of modernist masters like Picasso, Matisse and Giacometti, Klein arrives at a universal truth: human beings will always and forever be obsessed with themselves, others, and how others perceive them.
“Damn Portraits!” began Professor Klein, quoting Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres—an abrupt and honest exclamation that served as a perfect prelude to the difficult battle that portraiture was doomed to fight once the modern age descended on a timeless artistic tradition. Ingres, like many artists of his time, despised portraiture.
He often complained that the overwhelming number of commissions from high society kept him from focusing on “more important” subject matter. In the 19th Century, it seemed as if the only demographic that had an affinity for portraiture was the social elite. When the 20th Century began, many creative figures decried the art form’s declining relevance. Portraiture posed a series of difficult questions for the artist: How does one capture the complexity of human identity? How can an inner quality be expressed outwardly? How can a still representation do justice to a personality trait that is defined by its movement? Modernism, says Klein, provided the platform that was so desperately needed: a movement that joined portraiture with the abstraction of the avant-garde.
Through an array of examples, Klein revealed how artists like Picasso and Matisse were uninterested with the centrality of the sitter, which historically would have been fundamental. In works like Girl with Green Eyes (1908), Matisse blended his sitters into a decorative pattern where no single component of the painting could dominate. Picasso’s Gertrude Stein (1906), on the other hand, showcases both the artist and the sitter, serving as a visual statement of the height and legitimacy of both Stein’s and Picasso’s careers. Klein taught the audience that through the execution of her face, as was common with many of Picasso’s portraits, the artist imposed a mask-like quality that hardly resembled Stein’s genuine appearance. The primitivization of her face is a symbolic and telling mark of the beginning of an important aesthetic shift.
After the First World War, artists became increasingly cynical of humanistic values, and rapid advances in photographic technology threatened representational portraiture. Expressive abstraction began to take hold, providing the artist with infinite ways to communicate power, status and legitimacy—and the line between art and vulgarity became harder to define. Marcus Harvey’sMyra (1995) is an example of how modern portraiture could become a PR dream come true. Harvey’s portrait of Myra Hindley, a woman convicted of murdering multiple innocent child victims, is comprised of tiny flesh colored hands, hands meant to represent those of the children that she murdered.
Portraiture’s many levels of expression, as in Myra, have the potential for endless symbolism and emotion. I could feel the tension in the lecture hall when Myra came on screen, and I could see that the man next to me was trying to conceal his goose bumps.
Professor Klein’s lecture was most certainly a personal highlight of my many years of studying and appreciating portraiture. Regardless of one’s knowledge of art, he was able to communicate his subject with admirable passion and vigor. Professor Klein carried the double-barreled theme of portraiture and its modernist survival from the turn of the 20th Century through the fall of Saddam Hussein. It was quite frankly one of the most fun Saturdays I’ve had in a while, and I don’t think I was alone. The jam-packed lecture hall’s enthusiastic applause was proof enough that nobody was falling asleep before Klein could finish his sentences.
-By Brittany Krasner
The Norton Simon’s calendar of educational lectures will certainly expand your art related intellectual repertoire. For more information on upcoming lectures, please visittheir website.
Kimberly Brooks had a great idea recently. The local, Venice-based painter decided to look into the art that plays a role in our everyday lives and the people holding the cards behind it. She looked beyond museum shows, beyond advertisements, and into the world of fashion that is so often considered less of an art form and more of a necessity. The men and women working behind the scenes to make our world a touch more glamorous are artists who recognize that the necessity of fashion can be one of the more creative enterprises in our lives and it can be one that makes (or doesn’t make) the right impression.
In her latest series of paintings, called “The Stylist Project”, Kimberly Brooks scoured the world of stylists, costume designers, and Creative Directors to delve deeper into the minds of who exactly is dressing our most photographed celebrities and our most watched characters in TV and film. She painted Vogue’s Creative Director Grace Coddington and Mad Men costume designer Janie Bryant in their most comfortable settings (albeit in their most fabulous clothes). She painted Elizabeth Stewart, a stylist for the New York Times Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar, with a gorgeous and colorful palette and she captured the nervy and frazzled essence that is Rachel Zoe.
We got a chance to sit down with Brooks to discuss just what went into “The Stylist Project” and the upcoming show at Taylor de Cordoba gallery in Culver City. We learned very quickly that stylist is a pretty loose term to us amateurs, but in the business, a stylist can be anyone who fashions a photo shoot (often-times called a Creative Director) to someone who styles a celebrity for a red carpet event. Brooks’ colors and masterful way with a paintbrush allows us into this inner sanctum of fashion via the world of art – it’s almost as if we know them just by looking at these paintings.
Check out our video interview and go say hi to your new friends (the stylists, of course) at the opening reception at Taylor de Cordoba gallery on Saturday evening (February 27). The show runs through April 3, 2010. For more information, pleaseclick hereor call (310) 559-9156.
From George Washington on the Delaware, to Huck Finn on the Mississippi, to Katrina on the Gulf, rivers make up an integral part of the geographical, historical, cultural, political, and artistic landscape of the America we know. And Los Angeles is no exception. Yes it’s true that for the good part of the year, the L.A. River remains hopelessly barren, and provides a better bike path to Long Beach than it does a waterway. But if you’ve ever actually step foot into that mighty concrete divider of our city, then you’d know it’s every bit as organic and symbolic as any other great river. Whether it’s the plastic bag trees, the graffiti-worn banks, or the garbage disposal current, one would be hard-pressed to not find the same beauty that Mark Twain once described in his memoir, Life on the Mississippi, as “…a wonderful book…which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it had uttered them with a voice.”
On show until July 3rd at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the collective exhibition entitled The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River(UGLAR for short) also uses the metaphor of a book, only this one screams its secrets. Consisting of a wide range of contemporary, LA-based artists, this unique assortment of paintings, sculptures, photographs, and illustrations all converge like tributaries into one central theme: the Los Angeles River.
One oil painting called “Confluence” by Tyson Dolan portrays the intersection of two concrete canals, meeting and opening into the space of the viewer. The colors are muted, almost foggy, and with the installed background sounds of dripping water and distant train bells echoing throughout the room, one gets the distinct feeling of being alone and drifting through Dolan’s industrial river-basin.
Another piece, up-and-comer Rob Sato’s “Land Admiral Lefebvre’s Fleet Makes Sail”, takes a more surreal, maximalist route. This multi-medium, ‘Where’s Waldo’ mash-up depicts an elaborate, farcical, eighteenth-century showdown between the Blue-Coats and the Reds on the battlefield of the Los Angeles River. There’s of course no water for the huge wooden ships, so the implied Admiral Lefebvre sails upon his own ocean, with hundreds of tiny minions carrying the actual waves themselves. Not to be ignored in this spectacle are Sato’s frequent dips into brash absurdity: slave-like giants, a monstrous fish-man-beast riding a whale like an Avatar pterodactyl, and if you look hard enough, a modern car wreck upon the bridge over the river.
The biggest work on show, however, is a mural completed by all the contributing artists. It’s title is “The River Experiment,” and it speaks to the theme of the collection, which is one of evolution, or perhaps more accurately, mutation. Because The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River – to complete Mark Twain’s quote – “[is] not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”
The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River runs until July 3rd at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. For more information, please visit pmcaonline.org, or call (626) 568-3665.
There are times when we wish we were still in school. No, we aren’t talking about the recess and naptime days of elementary school, but rather those hazy college days when we could schedule classes only on Tuesdays and Thursdays if we pleased. Or refuse to take a class before noon. Oh, how college prepared us for the real world.
Well, we are starting to yearn for those days more so, mostly because USC has some awfully tempting artist lectures as of late.
Last night, artist and writer Vito Acconci participated in USC’s Master of Public Art Studies’ Critical Conversation program. Acconci is widely known for his infamous piece Seedbed, in which the artist lay underneath a ramp installed at the Sonnabend Gallery. While visitors walked over the ramp, he vocalized his…erm…fantasies about them via a loudspeaker.
Today, Martha Rosler, an artist and writer, will speak as part of the MFA’s lecture series. Rosler’s work tends to focus on women’s experience of daily life and within the public sphere. You can see her piece Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) above. Her performance mimics a home cooking show, but instead of whipping up a tasty dish, she demonstrates the function of various kitchen tools that becomes violent at times.
[February 24, 12:00- 2:00pm; Lecture Forum Graduate Fine Arts Building, 3001 S. Flower Street, Los Angeles, CA 90007]
If you decide to stick around until the evening, the undergraduate lecture series is going to screen Beautiful Losers, a film that focuses on an artist group in the early 1990s that found inadvertent success in the art and commercial world. Some of these Beautiful Losers include Barry McGee, Ed Templeton, Geoff McFetridge, Harmony Korine, and Shepard Fairey. Afterward, filmmaker Aaron Rose will speak.
[7:00-9:30pm; University Park Campus, Harris Hall, Gin D. Wong Auditorium, HAR 101]
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens and LACMA are both about to come into a little bit of an inheritance. The private collection of Sidney and Frances Lasker Brody, which is filled to the brim with enviable works, will go up for auction at Christie’s in May. According to the LA Times’ Culture Monster, The Huntington is set to get a share of the upcoming sale, while LACMA will be the lucky recipient of a 12-by-11-foot mural that the Brody’s commissioned from Matisse. Go back. Read that again. They commissioned a mural, called “La Garde,” from Matisse.
A while ago, 
The last time the 
Truthfully, the opera is an indulgent college project from a very, very talented student, with glimpses of the Projectors’ current, much more successful musical incarnation nestled in like raisins studded into a very wobbly gray oatmeal. In the first song (er, movement), “
Ever wonder what happened to 
When most people think of portraiture, images of aristocracy adorned in their finest medieval robes atop a crackling grand fireplace in some remote European castle probably come to mind. When I mention that I focused on 18th-19th Century portraiture in college, people look as if they’re about to fall asleep before I can finish the sentence. But this past Saturday, I attended a lecture at 
Through an array of examples, Klein revealed how artists like Picasso and Matisse were uninterested with the centrality of the sitter, which historically would have been fundamental. In works like 
Portraiture’s many levels of expression, as in Myra, have the potential for endless symbolism and emotion. I could 
From George Washington on the Delaware, to Huck Finn on the Mississippi, to Katrina on the Gulf, rivers make up an integral part of the geographical, historical, cultural, political, and artistic landscape of the America we know. And Los Angeles is no exception. Yes it’s true that for the good part of the year, the 
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