It was cast and unveiled (in my opinion) at the peak of the Banksy hype in 2006.

It’s an edition of 12 and measures 25 by 30 by 21cm.; 9 7/8  by 11 3/4  by 8in.

Catalog quotes Banksy:

They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilizations to their knees. If you are dirty, insignificant and unloved then rats are the ultimate role model.

It’s painted bronze measuring 91 by 54 by 57cm.; 35 7/8 by 21 1/4 by 22 1/2 in. Executed in 2006.

Marc Quinn:

I was looking for the current incarnation of the Venus/Aphrodite archetype, and I looked at the various film stars and models. It was Kate’s ubiquity and her muteness that made her seem to me more like a classical divinity than any of the others I considered; she is someone who never really speaks but who is continually spoken about; that makes her a very effective mirror of ourselves – our desires, our obsessions, our dreams. What’s still more intriguing is the way that her and her image have parted company – she has one life and the image has a different one.

If I had the funds, I’d buy it.

On view, at Jerome Zodo‘s booth, was one of Solmi’s most controversial works, The Evil Empire, a 4-minute video that chronicles the exploits of a porn-addicted Pope in the fictional town Vatic-Anal-City (A trailer of it is at the end of this post). I watched it a few times, back to back, and with each viewing, I chuckled and marveled at the genius of it. The subject matter definitely inspired conversation; it hit every scandal that the Catholic church should be ashamed of, and then some. But the beauty of it all was how it was presented – a series of crude, bright drawings strung together stop-motion style. This was probably the first time I ever gave consideration to owning video art. Well, this was before I came to know the price – $20,000! And being around since 2008, all 10 copies of this video are now accounted for. I was able to at least leave with a copy of the catalog.

In addition, there were a bunch of these panels from the film mounted on wood that appealed to me.

…and if things go my way, I may be able to acquire a few of them.

Here’s a copy + paste of Federico’s Artist Statement:

As an untiring observer of the alienated scenery of the metropolitan reality, I am focusing in my works, to analyze the paradoxical and neurotic urban landscape and the colossal contradiction of contemporary society. These are the key themes on which my artistic search has been based.

The protagonists of my videos are always catapulted into the middle of an undecipherable reality. Typically they are all lost characters; confused inhabitants of a world in which are desperately seeking their role and their identity and forced to live inside a mad and hostile society without rules. This is a world that inexorably continues to regenerate and to renew itself, while at the same time is falling in front of our eyes. The universe that I like to represent is the exaltation of a present that is crumbling apart. It is also a criticism of a system that approves and trusts without questioning the fragile foundation on which our culture and post-modernist society is based.

 Here’s a video clip of The Evil Empire:

Link: Federico Solmi

this is how I roll…

saw this on my way out. funny.

Link: ALAC

Copy + Paste of the article that went with the slideshow:

In a season full of black-tie benefits, it was at the more dressed-down art events where Los Angeles’ most interesting fall fashion could be found. Last week’s LAX Art’s benefit auction, held at The Brick Building in the Culver City, Calif. gallery district, drew a mix of street-chic looks and vintage flair — from colorful coats and tights to quirky accessories to, of course, the requisite black.

Link: WWD

Notes from LACMA:

During a residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2000, Ligon held workshops in which children were invited to fill in images taken from coloring books from the 1960s and 1970s that were intended to foster cultural knowledge and pride among black children. The books included historical and contemporary African Americans, including Harriet Tubman, Malcom X, and Isaac Hayes.

The participating children hailed from diverse ethnic backgrounds and were mostly unaware of the figures they colored or the ideological agenda they were meant to promote. Sometimes they painted them a deep brown, but in other instances afros became bright orange, Frederick Douglass’ eyes blue, and Hayes’ beard blond.

These images became the basis for the paintings… “Icons are made and remade,” he has remarked. “The project is about getting at that mutability through these kids’ drawings and my reiterations of them… The slipperiness of the images…and the anxiety around that slipperiness was interesting to me.”

 =)

Really great stuff.

Showed us some of his past projects…

…. he gets around in a silver BMX bike… very cool… he was also a gracious host and had wine (with his own label), beer, and chocolate covered deliciousness for us.

 a couple of photos sit at the foot of this painting…

masking tape still on….i really like seeing behind the scenes shit like this…

a multi-blue sculpture in front of the painting…

this larger painting really caught my eye….

i could see myself living with this piece. once i get my finances in order, going to have to commission a panel.

..Definitely, one artist to keep an eye on…….Cheers!

Link: Topher Chin

View from the street….lots of people in black (myself included)…

Free booze!

tasty..

Live auction conducted by Christie’s…

the only art work I considered buying… by Ned Vena.

….. everything else was not so good.

Link: LAXArt

Predictably, this event drew more of the Fashion crowd than the Art crowd…. it’s okay, I like pretty people.

Upstairs, there was this big cube projecting Hedi’s signature black and white images while LA-based No Age banged on drums.

Copy + Paste of an Article in The New York Times on the show:

November 9, 2011
A Fashion Designer’s Second Act
By AUSTIN CONSIDINE

WHEN Hedi Slimane stepped down as artistic director at Dior Homme in 2007, Fashion Wire Daily summed up his tenure this way: “Slimane leaves Dior with the well-earned reputation as the single most influential men’s designer this century, the most copied of his peers and the only one to achieve the status of a rock star.”

The comparison was apt, given Mr. Slimane’s celebrity and his role in styling the likes of Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Jack White, and the outsize reputation he garnered in his relatively brief life as a fashion designer, starting at Yves Saint Laurent in 1996, when he was just 28, and then at Dior in 2000.

Few people leave their profession when they are at the top of the game. In fashion, perhaps only Tom Ford comes to mind. But even Mr. Ford — after a stint in Hollywood that culminated in his direction of the Oscar-nominated “A Single Man” — came back into the fold and is now designing again.

But Mr. Slimane seems to have left fashion behind with nary a second thought, reinventing himself as a photographer in the past few years, one who has produced an array of strikingly intimate portraits, nearly all of them black and white, of some of the most famous faces in contemporary culture: Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga, Brian Wilson, Gisele Bundchen, Robert De Niro and Kate Moss.

Never one to talk volubly about himself — interviews from when he was at Saint Laurent and Dior were infrequent, and now read as if they might have been slightly torturous for the young designer — Mr. Slimane has remained somewhat elusive in his new career. He regularly declines to talk to the press and consented to an interview only under the condition that it be conducted solely by e-mail.

His postfashion life has not gone entirely unnoticed, however. Most recently, Mr. Slimane’s photographs of an all-grown-up Frances Bean Cobain — the daughter of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love — became an Internet sensation, bringing Mr. Slimane’s name back into the public domain.

Those portraits of Ms. Cobain — “It was about a simple testimony of her 18 years,” Mr. Slimane wrote in an e-mail — followed a series of well-received gallery shows in Europe and the release of a new book of Mr. Slimane’s photos, “Anthology of a Decade: 2000-2010.” And now there is the unveiling of an exhibition of his new work, “California Song,” which opens on Saturday at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art Pacific Design Center.

Taken together, they represent something of a coming-out party for Hedi Slimane, photographer.

Certainly, for Jeffrey Deitch, recently appointed the director of the Los Angeles museum, Mr. Slimane’s work is worthy of a major multimedia exhibition, which will include prints and projections and feature music by No Age, a Los Angeles band.

“I’ve always, from the beginning, thought that he was one of the most original artistic voices of his generation,” Mr. Deitch said in a telephone interview. “I’m fascinated with artists like Hedi, where there’s a vision of art that goes beyond one’s medium.”

As the name of the show suggests, Mr. Slimane, who is French, has found something of a muse in the state of California.

“It is just about alignments really, and everything falls into place right now,” he said about Los Angeles, which he has called home since last year. “Artists, museums, and galleries are much stronger. There is also the space for everyone, the distance to elaborate. It certainly had a big influence on me.”

When one looks at much of Mr. Slimane’s American work from the last few years, it is hard not to think of the Swiss photographer Robert Frank, the consummate European outsider looking in, identifying and reassigning to Americans their own lost mythology.

“It is almost about a utopia,” Mr. Slimane said of the show, adding: “I discovered Los Angeles in the late ’90s. The city was not at its best at the time, but I fell for it right away. There is something almost haunted about it, a vibrant mythology I find rather inspiring.”

Mr. Deitch said that in Mr. Slimane’s work there seemed to be no clear line between where photography ended and music, fashion or fine art began.

“One of the reasons why there’s such a connection between the photography and the clothing design is that his vision is sculptural,” Mr. Deitch said.

It is difficult to examine Mr. Slimane’s photo work separately from his reign atop the world of men’s fashion. In particular, the Dior years would define a very specific moment in his and pop culture’s conjoined histories. The black skinny jean, the skinny black tie, the short-waisted leather jacket or snug blazer: his work at Dior, where he created Dior Homme, is credited with helping bring men’s wear from the loose-fitting, slacker style of the 1990s into the postmillennial look of form-fitting, clean lines.

When Mr. Slimane left Dior amid well-publicized infighting with executives, published reports suggested he wanted to start his own label and possibly move into women’s fashion. Since then, however, the world of design is one he has not seemed particularly eager to rejoin.

“With fashion design, there was also always a risk at the time to lose the sense of the perspective, the discernment,” he said, adding: “It might have been perceived as an abrupt switch for others, but it felt like precisely the right moment for me, in 2007. I had already mainly defined my style, and could let it on its own for a while, see where it ends up, or survives in the streets.”

For Mr. Slimane, now 43, full immersion in photography was a return to an interest he pursued while growing up. As a student, he took classes in photography and studied political science, in hopes of becoming a reporter and photographer on international affairs.

Ultimately, he would switch his focus to art history. Fashion came next, which, like his photography today, exhibited an intense fixation on rock culture.

“Just like zillions of children, album covers educated and informed me, and certainly did I later transpose organically, rather than by intent, those principles both in fashion design and photography,” he said.

His photo work often portrays musicians at the fringes of fame or notoriety: up-and-coming artists whose bona fides lie primarily in the independent music scene. Others, perhaps, achieved widespread renown (or infamy), like Amy Winehouse or Pete Doherty, but seemed somehow to remain at the frayed, tragic edges of rock culture.

Mr. Slimane wrote that he felt most attracted to “a certain creative honesty, an authenticity, sometimes a vulnerability” when selecting photo subjects. Those subjects, whether emerging musicians or simply someone he discovers on the street, “are usually not yet fully aware of their talent, or grace,” he explained.

“They are either completely restless, in a romantic, antiheroic manner,” he continued, “or, on the contrary, totally introverted — which you might call an ambiguous space, or rather, for me, an oblique space.”

What unifies much of Mr. Slimane’s work is its fixation on the “transient age between childhood and adulthood,” as he described it. It also, as some have praised and others have criticized, vaunts a certain prepubescent androgyny.

“It is about transformation, and search of identity,” he said. “By nature, it is undefined, both psychologically and physically.”

Mr. Slimane attributed his longstanding fascination with androgyny in part to the ambiguities in his first name.

“Hedi was and is still misspelled ‘Heidi,’ and my perception of genders ended up slightly out of focus from an early age,” he said.

“Besides this ambiguity, my first record was a Bowie album,” he said, referring to “David Live,” which he got for his sixth birthday. He absorbed glam rock, he said, which “became a normative experience for me, and certainly the most significant creative influence for the future in both design and photography.”

One of Mr. Slimane’s favorite subjects at the moment — and the promotional centerpiece of “California Song” — is Christopher Owens, the singer and the guitarist for the San Francisco band Girls. A look at Mr. Slimane’s portraits of him make it clear why: the skinny, sad-eyed singer, with his painted nails, long, stringy blond hair, tattoos and haunting stare, perfectly encapsulates the California moment — its sun-infused indie rock sounds and its slacker-fashion renaissance, recalling early images of a young, drug-addled Kurt Cobain, peering warily and wearily into the abyss of impending stardom.

Mr. Owens said in a phone interview that Mr. Slimane’s portraits of Gore Vidal, one of Mr. Owens’s favorite authors, persuaded him to pose for several shoots: one in and around Mr. Slimane’s home in Los Angeles, and two more in Mr. Owens’s environs in San Francisco.

“He doesn’t talk very much at all while shooting or while he’s hanging out; he’s more of a listener,” Mr. Owens said. “He wanted me to very much be myself, you know; there wasn’t any kind of styling or weird things like that, which are always uncomfortable. He just wanted me to do my thing and be very natural. But, at the same time, he knew exactly what he wanted to do as far as the structure of the shot went.”

Still Mr. Slimane remains elusive, even among friends.

“It’s kind of embarrassing now that we’ve become friends, but I really don’t know that much about him,” Mr. Owens said.

That intense circumspection is, of course, what seems to make Mr. Slimane who he is. It’s a kind of resolute searching in the darkness that has come to define his work, which has, in turn, documented and informed, defined and refined the era in which he lives.

“He’s interested in performers, artists, who have an affinity for and an inspiration from the darker side,” Mr. Deitch said. “The work is something that leads into the darkness, but you come out with positive inspiration. It’s not all depressing work. It looks into the deeper recesses of the soul.”

Copy + Paste of MOCA’s Press Release:

The Museum of Contemporary Art presents Hedi Slimaneʼs California Song, the first West Coast solo museum exhibition of the photographerʼs work, on view at MOCA Pacific Design Center from November 12, 2011, through January 22, 2012. California Song spans the photographerʼs “California period” and traces his explorations of cycles of urban youth culture and artistic communities, through installations of photographic essays, exhibitions, and publications.

Slimane has achieved global recognition over the past decade for his discovery and presentation of emerging musicians and artists. His publications on London youth are among the first books published about the early days of the new British punk-rock movement at the beginning of this decade, capturing the birth of the first generation of Internet users, and redefining the concept of “fans” as an indie youth imagery that has developed globally through emerging social networks. Slimaneʼs widely followed photographic “diary,” created in 2006, established and popularized an entirely new genre—the online photo diary.

Slimane has invented a new and oblique visual language to represent youth and reinvent the rock documentary. In his work, live performance is reduced to a minimal, photographic lexicon—a ritual black-and-white convention of signs. Still life photographs become almost liturgical—a singular, silent expression of youth.

“Hedi Slimane has created a new and fresh visual language for youth today,” said MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch. “His black-and-white images capture the essential expression of the emerging art, fashion, and music scenes around the world.”

Slimane’s exhibition at MOCA will be divided into two parts. An installation and a series of black-and-white print photographs from his California years will be presented on the ground floor, and a sonic, motion-photography installation, produced specifically for MOCA, will be featured on the second floor. The installation will reference a multi-projection, cubic, architectural format, which Slimane has constructed in previous exhibitions to present his photographs, using serial construction and repetition to create an archaic form of cinematic narration.

Slimaneʼs allusive portraiture, in which photographs, portraits, and still life compositions are often signs or fragments of a portrait, will be projected in a repetitive, almost ritual, manner. The installation will also address “performance act,” as defined for the first time in Slimaneʼs photographic essay, Stage (2004), and will include a live performance space underneath the projection.

Select California bands, such as No Age, will contribute to the installation, using a fragmentary sound system, and composing panoramic scores—extended, visual song formats—which will form a dialogue with and define a sonic vocabulary for the photographs.

The exhibition will reference Berlin Project (1999–2002), which was presented in 2003 at Kunst-Werke, Berlin, and MoMA PS1, New York, and is accompanied by the book Berlin (Steidl, 2003). It will also encompass The London Years (2003–2007) presented in 2004, 2006, and 2007 at Almine Rech Gallery, Paris; at Sprüth Magers Gallery, Munich, in 2005; at MUSAC, León, 2008; and referenced in Stage and London Birth of A Cult (Steidl) in 2005.

The California period began in July 2007, during Young American at Foam Amsterdam. In February 2011, Fragments Americana, an exhibition of Slimaneʼs photographs, was presented at Almine Rech Gallery in Brussels. At the same time, Almine Rech Gallery in Paris presented California Dreamin—Myths and Legends of Los Angeles, a group show curated by Slimane featuring artists John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Bruce Conner, John McCracken, Aaron Curry, Mark Grotjahn, Mark Hagen, Patrick Hill, Dennis Hopper, Mike Kelley, Joel Morrison, Raymond Pettibon, Ed Ruscha, Sterling Ruby, Jim Shaw, Hedi Slimane, and Aaron Young, many of whom are included in the museumʼs permanent collection and have been presented in solo, retrospective, and large-scale thematic exhibitions at MOCA. Slimaneʼs book Anthology of a Decade, published March 2011 (JRP/Ringier), includes a photography essay dedicated to the California period.

The art was kind of crap.

Fortunately, the pretty people in attendance made up for it.

Copy + Paste of the Press Release from Gagosian:

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition “11.11.11” by Adam McEwen, his first in Los Angeles.

The numerical and graphic symmetry of the title gives an epochal feel to this major exhibition by McEwen, which makes explicit the interrelationships between individual works and persistent themes in his oeuvre via a specifically devised scenography. Wall-size grids of black-and-white photographic wallpaper—from the firestorming of Dresden, to McEwen dressed up as Bomber Harris (the British air commander who perfected the technique of carpet-bombing German cities during WWII), and gum-spattered New York sidewalks—line several galleries, drawing an analogy between planned destruction and urban desecration. They provide backdrops for droll “gum” paintings and impassive, machined graphite “paintings” that recall Minimalist compositions but which are, in fact, modeled on the figured, non-slip metal doors inset into New York sidewalks.

In 1994, McEwen made a drawing of a block, labeling it BLOCK OF GRAPHITE. But it was not until 2007 that, fascinated by the possibilities of this common but often unrecognized material, he began producing via industrial machining finely carved graphite sculptures that mimic real objects. In this exhibition, precise representations of everyday items—a water cooler, a roll gate, a safe—animate the galleries with their eerie reticence, a series of simulacra perfectly and perversely rendered in what is, in reality, dark, light-absorbing, compressed carbon. (The dust from the graphite industry is sold on to pencil companies.)

In a reverse Midas-effect, McEwen has answered to the shimmering claims of Minimalist art by creating contemporary work that is freighted with the leaden melancholy of modern history. As a meditation on the many lives and deaths of art, he has created a space that conflates a beleaguered present with the afterlife of a potent and contentious moment in art history, in much the same way as his obituaries narrate the future-perfect of the rich, the famous, the beautiful, and the notorious. McEwen’s dead zone of dark relics and faded memories confronts us, literally and metaphysically, with the filthy lucre of our past and present.

Adam McEwen’s work has been included in numerous group shows including “Haunted,” the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); “Beg, Borrow and Steal,” Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2009); “The Reach of Realism,” MoCA Miami (2009); “Into Me/Out of Me,” PS1 / MOMA, New York; and the 2006 Whitney Biennial. He curated “Fresh Hell” at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, as the 2010 edition of the Carte Blanche series.

Link: Gagosian

Close up of Big Dipper, 2011, Oil on canvas, 9′ (H) X 12′ (W)

MH and his girl messing up my photo of Desert Stream, 2010, Oil on canvas, 9’ (H) X 12’ (W)

My favorite from the show: Reliance, 2010, Oil on canvas, 8′ (H) x 6′ (W)

quite crowded.

Copy + Paste of Ace Gallery’s Press Release:

In 1976, as a young painter David Amico embraced an unstylized, abstract and demanding approach to painting and has been committed to this process ever since. He executes each abstract painting by never allowing himself to follow a particular technique or style so that each painting has its own unique composition and application of paint. Over his 35-year career, this non-serial pursuit has allowed him to explore painting in a most unrestrictive and innovative manner. This inventive engagement with painting can be experienced in the compositions and paint applications of his two most recent bodies of work, the Factory/Park Series, installed in his current exhibition at Ace.

Ace Gallery is the host of the first exhibition of Factory Series in the United States (the first exhibition of this series was in Singapore last year), an exhibition that will be combined with the newly created Park Series. The imagery found in both series is jointly inspired by the urban debris of Amico’s immediate environment: the Skid Row district of downtown Los Angeles. He transforms what has been discarded and considered unsightly into building blocks of beautiful contemplative spaces. Discarded cardboard, metal piping, broken concrete, shards of glass, graffiti, vandalism, and fabric scraps from the nearby garment factories – all these materials have participated in an unlikely transformation, inviting the viewer to share in what Doug Harvey has called “a zone of phenomenological flip-flop, where [the art is] neither one thing, nor the other, nor both, and not neither. Which is where paintings belong. The result is artwork that is unusually alive, that feeds information to the viewer in a flickering, almost cybernetic light, extending an invitation for the observer to partake in the continuity between the world, the artist, and his art.” (Doug Harvey, David Amico: Coloring Outside the Lines).

Amico has a relationship with these materials far beyond mere observation; he studies them in search of their quintessence. He then meticulously abstracts their qualities in paint, distorting the reality of the original subject. His precision in creating texture is so thorough that several works such as Augustine (2009) and Window (2009) convey the illusion of a layered collage but were in fact executed through the process of detailed paint application. Beyond the masterful manipulation of his medium is a deliberate use of compositional decision-making that separates Amico from the fluid chaos of Abstract Expressionism.

Amico’s practice is an exploration in the nebulous space between art and life, blurring the lines between the junk-objects we pass unnoticed, and the art-objects we admire. No matter what the origin of the abandoned material, each has arrived in the same place – on the streets of Los Angeles – bringing into focus a visual-syntax, and ultimately democratizing the relationship between the discarded object, the art work, and the artist himself.

David Amico has established himself as one of Southern California’s most influential contemporary painters. Amico’s first major solo exhibition was held at P.S.1 in New York in 1976 and he has since exhibited in galleries in the United States, as well as Switzerland, Mexico, and China. It was for the 1976 P.S.1 exhibition he first adopted his unique unstylized practice, and he has not deviated from this methodology since.

David Amico was born in Rochester, New York in 1951. He currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

Link: Ace Gallery

 And of course, while there, I checked out his latest show, which is simply, amazing………..

Entering the main room, I was immediately drawn to this portrait of Kara Walker.

In fact, it was my favorite in the entire show.

the details are superb…

to the right was Laurie Anderson

turning another 45 degrees…

and another 45 degrees to complete the circle, encountered the face of Zhang Huan, another one of my favorite artists.

leaving the main gallery, entering a smaller room….

In another room…

In the final room, were two tapestries. I liked this one the best.

 This was definitely a show to remember.

Copy + Paste of Blum and Poe’s Press Release:

Blum & Poe is very pleased to present new paintings, prints, and tapestries by Chuck Close. This landmark exhibition is Close’s first one-person show with Blum & Poe and represents the most significant body of work assembled in Los Angeles in sixteen years. Featured will be new large-scale oil paintings of artists Kara Walker, Laurie Anderson, and Zhang Huan; works from Close’s ongoing self-portrait series; intimately scaled portraits of musician Paul Simon and arts patron Agnes Gund; a collection of prints; and immaculately crafted Belgian Jacquard tapestries. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity for viewers to experience Close’s stylistic range and technical capacity, while providing a deeper understanding of the human portrait.

Close’s nearly 50-year exploration of the human portrait is staggering in its breadth and level of dedication. Rather than landscapes or everyday urban scenes, Close has focused on his own image and those of his peers, differentiating his practice from photorealistic painters. His early paintings were predominantly large-scale and executed in acrylic on canvas. He has since evolved a process whereby these portraits begin as photographs, which are enlarged, transferred, and gridded on the canvas, allowing Close to work with his brush meticulously inch by inch.

Close moves freely between painting, photography (both analog and digital), numerous modes of printmaking and drawing, and most recently the art of Belgian Jacquard tapestry weaving. In an effort to capture his subject’s essence, Close has become fluent in myriad techniques, both traditional and exploratory. In 1972, his artistic practice extended beyond the canvas with an introduction to printmaking at San Francisco’s Crown Point Press. Following that collaboration, Close endeavored to expand his contribution to portraiture through the mastery of such varied drawing and painting techniques as ink, graphite, pastel, watercolor, conté crayon, finger painting, and stamp-pad ink on paper; printmaking techniques, such as Mezzotint, etching, woodcuts, linocuts, and silkscreens; as well as handmade paper collage, Polaroid photographs, Daguerreotypes, and Jacquard tapestries. His astonishing proficiency in a diverse range of media has firmly defined each new body of work as unique and progressive for its time.

Chuck Close (b. 1940, Monroe, WA) lives and works in New York. He received his B.A. from the University of Washington, Seattle and his B.F.A and M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art and Architecture. Throughout his distinguished career, he has been the recipient of many honors, such as the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Art (1991), election to Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998), and the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton (2000). He has been honored with numerous retrospectives, including Close Portraits, held at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1980-81), which traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Retrospektive, at Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden (1994), later presented at the Lenbauchhaus Stadtische Galerie, Munich; and most importantly Chuck Close, held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1989-99), which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Seattle Art Museum, and Hayward Gallery, London. Close’s work is in the permanent collection of over 70 public institutions worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, amongst many others.

Link: Blum & Poe

I like it; I’m going to try to track down a poster of it.

Copy + Paste from Christie’s catalogue….

Like Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square of 1915, which to some degree this painting resembles, Roy Lichtenstein’s I Can See the Whole Room and There’s Nobody in It! is a singular and iconic work that encapsulates a sense of its creator’s entire oeuvre and serves as a foundation stone upon which much of it was built. Painted in the summer of 1961, this deceptively simple yet deeply significant and celebrated painting is one of the very first of Lichtenstein’s pictures to draw solely on cartoon imagery for its subject-matter and to invoke what is perhaps the central theme of his work as a whole: the complex relationship between art and perception.

With its stark minimalist image of a monochrome black canvas suddenly punctured by the startling and illuminated presence of a cartoon male figure opening and looking through a peephole, I Can See the Whole Room is a spirited work that appears to visually disrupt the nature of both what a painting is and what it can be. It also serves as a pictorial symbol of the dramatic transition from abstraction to cartoon figuration that had suddenly taken place in Lichtenstein’s own art in 1961. An exemplar example of the artist’s highly intellectual approach to painting, I Can See the Whole Room is an undeniable early masterpiece of Lichtenstein’s pioneering and “Pop”-defining vision that was eagerly recognised as such by Emily and Burton Tremaine, who acquired it for their collection very soon after it was painted.

Considered consummate collectors of their age, Emily and Burton Tremaine were also the most prescient: among the first to understand and appreciate “Pop” art, they came to play an important supporting role during the early years of its genesis in America, even facilitating introductions between some of its leading members. As Emily Tremaine remembered, “about 1961, a comet flashed across this dark scene with a blazing light and we saw objects we really had not seen before. We were too busy looking within, but now we looked out and saw a ‘Yankee Doodle’ world of pop bottles, trading stamps, and comic strips. This was ‘Pop Art’, and it painted the wonderful, vulgar, jazzy, free, and crazy New York. It was not like Dada: the artists did not know one another; no-one was angry; there was no manifesto. They were just aware of the same images, but they used them differently…. We made several visits to Andy (Warhol’s) studio; we saw Jimmy Dine’s and Tom Wesselmann’s and James Rosenquist’s and Roy Lichtenstein’s. Once or twice we invited these boys to our apartment and in several instances they had not yet met one another. I remember in particular that Rosenquist met Lichtenstein for the first time here. So it seemed to me quite clear that this was not a group movement with members influencing each other, but a general sensitivity that was occurring simultaneously. Each artist was commenting on our environment in his own individual way, but with no great popular approval as far as I could see” (E. Tremaine quoted in The Tremaine Collection 20th Century Masters, exh. cat., Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, pp. 21 and 29).

With its simple but paradoxical sense of both looking toward and being looked at, I Can See the Whole Room is also a work that, like Pop art in general, opens up an entirely new world of conceptual possibilities for painting. And in this respect it is a work that emphatically anticipates the direction in which not only Lichtenstein’s art would develop over the ensuing years, but also that of many of his contemporaries in the 1960s. As Jeff Koons has recently noted of Lichtenstein’s oeuvre, there is a pervasive sense running through it “that he is really interested in you as a viewer,” and also in you “sharing this experience” (J. Koons, quoted in “Dorothy Lichtenstein and Jeff Koons, Florent Restaurant, Gansvoort Street, New York, April 11, 2008,” in Lichtenstein Girls, exh. cat., Gagosian, New York, 2008, p. 11). With its deliberate undermining of conventional notions of looking and seeing and its Bruce Nauman-like title emblazoned over its surface in a bold and unashamed text invading the picture-plane, I Can See the Whole Room and There’s Nobody in It! is a work of “Pop” art that also articulates and epitomizes, both in style and content, many of the concerns and inquiries of the Minimalist and Conceptual developments of the 1960s.

At four by four feet wide, it is a comparatively large and imposing picture, whose overt painterly surface texture, hand-drawn text, graphic markings, and underlying pencil script, reveal much of the pictorial craft that surprisingly, perhaps, lies at the very center of Lichtenstein’s cartoon paintings. In his later pictures, Lichtenstein often sought to mask the craft, the design, and the carefully considered alterations he put into translating a cartoon image into a successful oil painting by attempting to conceal it all behind a pristine and seemingly cold, mechanically-produced surface. But, in 1961, and as this work shows, Lichtenstein was still clearly fascinated with the extraordinary painterly dialogue between abstraction and mechanically-produced figurative cartoon imagery that had been established by his appropriation of such media.

Like its subject matter–a graphic contrast of a cartoon figure with an abstract black monochrome field–I Can See the Whole Room is a painting that visually appears to play on the edge of both abstract and figurative cartoon styles. Despite its often clinical appearance in reproduction, the flat monochrome black surface of this painting betrays a clear sense of its own making through a sequence of smooth, sweeping brushstrokes, whose autonomy and plasticity has been allowed to remain visible. These are overt painterly qualities that reflect Lichtenstein’s enjoyment in the process of creating the work and that in some respects can be seen as sly nods to the black paintings of contemporary “abstract” painters like Ad Reinhardt or even Franz Kline. Similarly, the flesh tones of the cartoon male figure have been attained with the subtle use of a grey wash, laid down before a regularized pattern of little flecks of red has been added. This deft and painterly simulation of the mechanical techniques of cartoon imagery would soon evolve into the more sterile mechanized discs of Lichtenstein’s trademark Benday Dot circles. Lichtenstein’s application of the yellow light of the background in the present work has been put down in two coats, whose differences have been deliberately left visible in order to advertise the working practice involved in the creation of the image. The first, a warmer, duller color, has subsequently been corrected and heightened with a thicker layer of extreme acid yellow that gives the apparent surprise of the cartoon image its full bite. In an extremely rare move, too, symptomatic only of these early canvases, Lichtenstein has added his monogram signature in red in the lower right hand corner of the work.

These are all comparatively traditional features of the painter’s art and of a consideration of the picture as a hand-crafted image that reflect to some extent how conventional Lichtenstein’s painterly practice was despite the radical, unorthodox, and, in the early 1960s, shocking, nature of his appropriation of cheap, mass-media imagery as the subject matter of his art. Reflective of a pure painter’s concern with his work, these features are ones that distinguish Lichtenstein’s early paintings from his later works, while also overtly illustrating how intensely Lichtenstein was deconstructing the conventions of picture making. As Donald Judd was among the first to point out at this time, “Lichtenstein is representing representation–which is very different from simply representing an object or a view. The main quality of the work comes from the contrast between the comic panel, apparently copied, and the art, nevertheless present” (D. Judd, “A critical review of the 1963 exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery,” Arts Magazine, New York, November 1963).

It was, in fact, precisely the surprise and shock of the extraordinary visual power of such a crude, simple, and artificial mode of representation as that of a cartoon, when seen in direct comparison with his own more “arty” explorations of abstract pictorial form that had led to Lichtenstein’s adoption of cartoon imagery in the first place. By 1961, Lichtenstein had been painting for more than fifteen years and, for the last five of those years, primarily abstractions, before he introduced comic-book imagery into his work. Following in the footsteps of an artist such as Willem de Kooning–who would absent-mindedly sketch from all types of media representation, even the television screen, in his search to establish what he called a “slipping glimpse” of life through a single strong graphic line or dynamic pictorial motif–Lichtenstein at first sought to derive a similar kind of inspiration from cartoon imagery. He was attracted by the simple mechanics of cartoon representation, by the abstract strength of line in the way a cartoon artist would draw an eyebrow, for example, and ultimately sought in the strong linearity of cartoon draughtsmanship a prompt or spur for his own Abstract Expressionist style. “I was sort of immersed in Abstract Expressionism,” Lichtenstein recalled; “It was a kind of Abstract Expressionism with cartoons within the expressionist image. It’s too hard to picture, I think, and the paintings themselves weren’t very successful. I’ve got rid of most of them, in fact all of them. They encompassed about six months. I did abstract paintings of sort of striped brushstrokes and within these in a kind of scribbly way were images of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. In doing these paintings I had, of course, the original strip cartoons to look at, and the idea of doing one without apparent alteration just occurred to me. I first discussed it and thought about it for a little bit, and I did one really almost half seriously to get an idea of what it might look like. And as I was painting this painting, I kind of got interested in organizing it as a painting and brought it to some kind of conclusion as an aesthetic statement, which I hadn’t really intended to do to begin with. And then I really went back to my other way of painting, which was pretty abstract. Or tried to. But I had this cartoon painting in my studio, and it was a little too formidable. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it, and it sort of prevented me from painting any other way, and then I decided this stuff was really serious. I had sort of decided that as I was working on it, but at first the change was a little bit too strong for me. Having been more or less schooled as an Abstract Expressionist, it was quite difficult psychologically to do anything else” (R. Lichtenstein “BBC Interview with David Sylvester,” recorded in New York, January 1966, and reproduced in Some Kind of Reality: Roy Lichtenstein exh. cat., Anthony D’Offay, London, 1997, p. 7).

Soon Lichtenstein realized that a painterly truth lay within these clichd, mechanically-produced cartoon images–images which, because of the simplistic mechanics of their construction, were fascinating, both figuratively and abstractly. Maturing in an era in America in which painting was dominated by either the gestural or the non-gestural abstract color-field painting of the New York School, and in which any “return” to figuration was still widely frowned upon, despite the recent developments of such artists as Rauschenberg and Johns, Lichtenstein’s choice of cartoon imagery as a subject matter was, for a long time, considered scandalous. Something of this sense of scandal, shock, but also of cartoon imagery’s dynamic impact on the abstract realm, is undoubtedly both contained and expressed in the simple cartoon disruption of the abstract picture plane in I Can see the Whole Room

The imagery of the painting derives from a 1961 William Overgard drawing for a Steve Roper cartoon story (August 6) that depicts Roper’s war-time buddy and part-time accomplice in crime-solving, “Mike Nomad” looking through a peephole. Lichtenstein has cropped the image from its original rectangular format to form a square and then completely redesigned the speech balloon so that it extends across almost the entire top edge of the painting. He has also simplified the drawing of Nomad’s face significantly, reducing it to bare essentials, while the sharp yellow background is clearly his own invention. Originally intended in a milder tone more reflective of the source image, it is the addition of an acidic supermarket yellow here that ultimately provides the painting with its garish Pop art sense of impact. “Each color had a certain character to me,” Lichtenstein pointed out. “The yellow was acid…. I got some of these colours from supermarket packaging. I would look at package labels to see what colours had the most impact on one another” (R. Lichtenstein, “Interview with Diane Waldman,” in Roy Lichtenstein, exh. cat., New York, 1971, p. 26).

Lichtenstein’s long-time fascination with the science and psychology of perception is clearly reflected in these works as is the paradoxical idea, first established in I Can See the Whole Room and There’s Nobody in It!, of engaging the viewer in a game of looking with its subject matter. Part of the deconstructive nature of Lichtenstein’s painterly investigation of the cartoon archetype was clearly aimed at what he described as “shaking up” people’s confidence in their own vision, and even more importantly perhaps, disrupting his own acquired conventions of seeing and perceiving. Inspired greatly in this by his teacher and mentor at Ohio State University, Hoyt L. Sherman, with whom he studied and later taught in the early 1950s, Lichtenstein’s adoption of abstraction, as with his later use of strip-cartoon imagery, was prompted by a desire to continually develop ever-new ways of seeing. Sherman’s “ideas on perception were my earliest important influence and still affect my ideas of visual unity,” Lichtenstein told Gene Swenson in 1963. (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in G. R. Swenson, “What is Pop Art? Answers for Eight Painters Part 1,” Art News 62 no. 7, November 1963, p. 25).

Foremost among these, and with particular relevance to I Can See the Whole Room…, was the “Flash Room” that Sherman built in Ohio as a means of re-training his students’ perceptual habits and instilling in them an almost camera-like ability to record their visual impressions in an immediate an instinctive way, uncorrupted by the intervention of cognitive thought or emotional response. As Lichtenstein recalled, Sherman’s “Flash Room” was “a darkened room where images would be flashed on a screen for very brief intervals-about a tenth of a second. Something very simple to start, maybe just a few marks. And you would have a pile of paper, and you’d try to draw it. You’d get a very strong afterimage, a total impression, and then you’d draw it in the dark-the point being that you’d have to sense where the parts were in relation to the whole. The images became progressively more complex, and eventually you would go out and try to work the same way elsewhere-would try to bring home the same kind of sensing to your drawing without the mechanical aid of a flash room” (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in Calvin Tomkins, The Art of Roy Lichtenstein: Mural with Blue Brushstroke, New York, 1987, p. 14).

Lichtenstein evidently practiced this technique himself and clearly brought something of the sense of “visual unity”–or “perceptual organization” as he referred to it–that it instilled, into his later paintings of cartoons. The minimalist-looking image of a sudden circular flash of yellow light and a figure peering through an aperture-like hole amidst an otherwise monochrome field of black in I Can See the Whole Room would certainly have reminded Lichtenstein of Sherman’s “Flash Room” and the practice of sitting in a darkened void occasionally receiving the visual flash of an image. With its partial eclipse-like circles of intense color and light set at the center of a black void, this object-like picture also presents a mesmerizing and seemingly mechanical image, whose pictorial form both appears to echo and indeed function like that of the inside of a camera, a retina, or a projector. In exuding these mechanical qualities, the painting emphasizes the automated or mechanical nature of seeing and opens up once again the question of the nature of seeing; for here in this work, a mechanically-produced cartoon figure is shown doing all the looking. And, as if to compound this, the playful pictorial fantasy or fiction suggested by the painting’s cartoon imagery is extended still further by the caption accompanying it that refers to the fact that the illustrated figure is looking and can see a whole room, but no viewer.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, “When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back into you.” In I Can See the Whole Room and There’s Nobody in It! Lichtenstein seems to be humorously suggesting that a similar condition applies to the nature of looking at art. Like his later paintings of mirrors for example–object-like paintings that seem to reflect both the reality and fiction of the cartoon world–the overt falseness of image-making (or of his own art) is brilliantly summarized in a simple act of mimesis that anticipates the later conceptually-orientated work on the same subject by artists Giulio Paolini or Joseph Kosuth.

Such eloquence and simplicity, so central to the extraordinary and enduring power of this painting, has, in fact, been painstakingly arrived at in this picture through a subtle but involved process of re-arranging, recomposing, redrawing, and reducing the forms of the source image until each is at its most minimal, but still representational-a crystallized “archetype” of itself. Most notable in this respect, as the critic Albert Boime first wrote in 1970, is the speech bubble, which Lichtenstein has carefully restructured and arranged along the top edge of the picture in such a way that its elegant and lilting curves are echoed by the curves and the outlines of the man’s face and fingers. It is through such masterly refinement that the painting becomes more clearly and more simply an engineered artifice or construction of elegantly abstracted forms coalescing, seemingly arbitrarily, on the overtly flat surface into a unitary image. In this way, the picture becomes in every detail, from its subject matter and text to its pictorial and painterly content, a work that actively questions the viewer’s own belief in what it is they are seeing. Ultimately, it coerces them into a recognition of their own mimetic status in relation to the figure that this painting purports to depict-forcing them to understand that, despite what their eyes might be telling them, they too can see the whole picture and there’s nobody in it.

Link: Christie’s

Upon entering her space, I was immediately drawn to her circle paintings, specifically, that green one – I was staring at that one for quite some time. I really liked the scale of them, and the color was also very calming…  and kind of made me crave matcha. Anyways, the circle paintings all featured a large, inner circle with two surrounding halos in varying gradients. She spoke a bit about experimenting with the viscosity of the paints to get her desired effect. I wish I paid more attention to her talk; I was too focused on appreciating those halos, or I was probably texting someone =)

If I had the wall space, I’d definitely pick one up.

Anyways, here’s a Copy + Paste of an excerpt of her artist bio….

Her work is included in many corporate and private collections.

Exhibitions include the Armand Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles, the Eli Broad Foundation of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (Barnsdall), Huntington Beach Art Center, Torrance Art Museum, the Toomey-Tourell Gallery (represented) in San Francisco, Acuna-Hansen Gallery, and Jancar Gallery in Los Angeles.

International exhibitions include the Lidovy Gallery in Prague and Galerie Califia in Horazdovice, Czech Republic, the Palace Ducale in Gubbio, Italy, the East China University in Shanghai, China, Museum of Contemporary Art in Minsk, Belarus, Zirrat Bankasi Gallery, Ankara, Turkey, Giacomo Projects, Venice, Italy, and the Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom.

Arrowsmith was born in San Francisco and received her B.F.A. from California State University Fullerton, and her M.F.A. at Claremont Graduate University. She lives and maintains her studio in Los Angeles.

Not only was it cool to see where he creates his monstrous sculptures, but it was really worthwhile to listen to him reminisce about his past shows at Honor Fraser, The Happy Lion, and the Wexner Center. I particularly appreciated learning about his process and inspirations for his art. It was fun to hear that he engages his kids in his art also.

Gustavo brought out a mold he used to cast his concrete sculptures.

………. telling us about his past shows

work in progress…

He had a lot of books and recommended to us Pictures of Nothing by Kirk Varnedoe. It’s about appreciating abstract art. His enthusiasm for the book really got me interested, and I’m considering picking it up after I finish the 10 books I’m currently reading.

 more works out on display…

made from invitation cards.

i particularly liked this one.

this piece was exhibited at The Happy Lion in Chinatown, and at The Gagosian in Beverly Hills.

A shelf with cool-looking sculptures…

close-up of the bottom left one..

close up of the bottom right one.

 C’est tout.

Corner of Warhols, particularly liked the Liz, Lot 402 (est. $25-30K), and the Mick Jagger, Lot 404 (est. $20-30K)

Jeff Koons x Supreme Skateboards – Monkey Train, Lot 324 (est. $1.5-2K).

John Baldessari’s Blue, From Stonehenge (With Two Persons). Lot 250 (est. $6-8K).

..and David Hockney’s Bora Bora, which also happened to grace the cover of the catalog. Lot 313 (est. $7-9K).

Link: Bonhams

Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Larry Bell, who is a featured artist of Getty’s Pacific Standard Time, reminisce about his days at the Ferus Gallery in the 1960s, and even talk up his latest show at Frank Lloyd Gallery, which is exhibiting early works that preceded his famous cubes.

 Here are pictures of what I thought was most interesting….

After the Vernissage party, Madame and I both agreed that there was way too much to take in. So, a couple of days later, we took a tour, led by this New York-based art consultant. It was cool to get her perspective on interesting art at the fair.

The first piece she showed us was this installation by Ai Wei Wei, courtesy of the Haines Gallery in San Francisco. It is titled Snake Bag because, well, it’s in the shape of a snake that spans 55 feet and was made out of 360 children backpacks. It was created in 2008, to commemorate the Sichuan earthquake that took the lives of many school children due to faulty school construction, as a result of local corruption. This was definitely an eye-catching piece with substance.

Next, we were taken to the Leila Heller Gallery‘s booth, where we were introduced to Rachel Lee Hovnian. This was one of my favorite booths of the entire fair. All of the artwork was pretty humorous. I especially liked this piece, which is basically a mirror embedded with bottles of Botox and Narcissus flower blooms.

At London-based Seventeen Gallery‘s booth, we became familiar with Susan Collis, who basically creates ordinary-looking things with luxurious materials, like this pile of crap….there’s platinum in there somewhere.

What I liked more was this piece. Looking like an ordinary screw, it is made of white gold, a diamond, and emerald. Madame said something about wanting to wear it as an earring.

Another spectacular booth at the show belonged to Haunch of Venison, which brought artist Chiharu Shiota to do this insane installation.

Later, we broke away from the tour group and did our own exploration. One of the first things we encountered on our own was this awesome grenade-shaped dresser in Pan American Art Project‘s booth. It was created by this collective that goes by Los Carpinteros.

The Franco/Ramirez video installation was interesting………….. actually, it was pretty freaking boring. hahaha.

….Hermes by Shelter Serra…. Birkins cast in resin.

..more Shelter Serra Hermes….

One of madame’s friends, Devin Troy Strother, had this piece titled Keep that Shit Flowin. I loved it. It was another of my favorites from the fair.

Friend Michael Haight had this piece, titled Sequence #1, at Cirrus Gallery‘s booth. He’s a conceptual type of guy. One day, I’ll have him explain to me why there’s a microphone.

Liked the details.

One of the perks of that nifty VIP card was gaining access to a lounge furnished by Poliform.

..where complimentary Intelligentsia coffee was served!

There were a bunch of after parties thrown over the weekend. Sadly, I was too exhausted to go to any of them. Oh well, next year!

Link: Art Platform – Los Angeles

Anyways, JL was on the Steve Turner’s Artist map, and despite being situated on skid row, received a number of visitors, like this guy who came to do an interview.

For those that missed it….

..visitors, upon entering the building, were greeted with hot pink signage…

and lots of tape to lead the way…

..and if they weren’t smart enough to figure it out….

ah, haven’t seen this in a while…

…brand new works…

..but before we get to them….

another diamond-shaped painting similar to the one she sold at Steve Turner Contemporary some time back…

great texture.

..now, close-ups of the new, smaller rectangular  paintings…. in this series, JL revisits old themes, as well as experiments with both minimalism and saturation….

down the hall, there was another diamond shaped painting, but presented as a regular square.

Entering the studio…

… encounter earlier works…

… i particularly liked the orange one..

works in progress… and a cool Dyson fan….

refreshments for guests…

work apron…

cool shoes, of course…

..c’est tout.

Tip: JL’s studio hours are by appointment only.

Link: IlliteJ

Link: Art Platform

MH, aka Token Blanche, apparently had a piece on the second floor.

 …….seriously. hahaha.

he tells me he did the sign for the gallery as well. kind of cool.

I got to meet the owner Jean Milant, cool guy.

Link:
Cirrus Gallery
Once Emerging Now Emerging 

The whole experience took about 2 hours. It was pretty fun. Here are some of the highlights…….

We started on the ground floor, where we met a curator who gave us a very informative tour. I especially liked hearing the back stories of the selected paintings.

Surrounded by works by Christopher Wool.

I liked this one for the humor.

from here, we took an elevator to a floor that had a lot of creepy shit, like this video installation.

..then we went to the rooftop to check out sculptures and the awesome Venice beach view. it was a nice day, so a group photo was taken.

..then we descended to my favorite floor, or the German room.. I really liked this work, Abstand by Albert Oehlen.

Many people gravitated towards Anselm Kiefer’s Laßt tausend Blumen blühen (Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom). It was impressive. I really liked the textures.

From here, we went to another floor of familiar works, like Jenny Saville’s Stare, which was used on the cover of Manic Street Preacher’s Journal for Plague Lovers album.

Finally, we went to a floor featuring new works like Richard Prince’s Another Girl, aka “the porn painting”

The other really strong work on this floor was Elliot Hundley’s Dionysus..

However, to really appreciate it, I had to get close….so many pins sticking out of it.

And there was this humorous box…

Friskies Human Flavor!

….and that’s all the photos that I found in my iphone.

Copy + Paste from Sotheby’s Catalogue:

‘I just can’t help thinking that [medical] science is the new religion for many people … there [are] four important things in life: religion, love, art and science. At their best, they’re all just tools to help you find a path through the darkness. None of them really work that well, but they help. Of them all, science seems to be the one right now. Like religion, it provides the glimmer of hope that maybe it will be all right in the end… I want… people to think about the combination of science and religion, basically. People tend to think of them as two very separate things, one cold and clinical, the other emotional and loving and warm. I want to leap over those boundaries and give you something that looks clinical and cold but has all the religious, metaphysical connotations too’ (Quoted in Damien Hirst: New Religion, exhibition catalogue, Paul Stolper, London 2005, p.V.).

Damien Hirst’s evocation of science and religion as the guiding lights for the human condition finds eloquent expression in the majestic equine form of Legend. This monumental winged horse stands atop its plinth as an icon of Hirst’s new modern mythologizing art. Pegasus was the legendary beast that Bellerophon rode to defeat the Chimera. The Chimera was another hybrid creature, representing the ferocity found in the animal kingdom, whilst Pegasus embodied the freedom and nobility of nature. This monumental sculpture is thus rendered in pure white, a towering beacon of strength and virtue. However, Hirst’s Legend has come under the scrutiny of the scientist/vivisectionist. One flank has been surgically flayed, exposing its muscles and bare bones, showing the secrets of this mythological animal in a colourful symphony of reds and yellows creating a dramatic contrast to the untouched sanctity of the other perfect white side.

The elegant counter-part to Legend, Myth embodies the fabled Unicorn, the shimmering white horse bearing a single twisted horn, a tusk that was considered an elixir of fertility and health and a symbol of universal power. The Unicorn is one of the most potent mythological symbols in western culture. The clerics and philosophers of the middle ages endowed it with a wealth of theological properties. The common lore of the period perpetuated an allegorical account of a unicorn being hunted until stilled by the presence of a virgin, who took the head of the beast upon her lap, where it slept. The wild beast had been tempered and tamed by the purity of the maiden. This story has inspired some of the most outstanding works of European art, including the majestic millefleur tapestry Maiden with Unicorn in the Musée de Cluny in Paris. The tale entered into the meta-history of the Virgin Mary, where the Unicorn became a symbol of Christ’s Passion, an elegiac symbol of his divine suffering and absolute purity. Hirst has frequently taken on the challenge of religion in his work. Indeed Myth can be situated amongst the most visually arresting of the artist’s sculptural oeuvre, including the similarly flayed Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain and Hymn in bronze, The Anatomy of an Angel in marble, and his iconic masterpiece preserved in formaldehyde, The Golden Calf.

Myth eloquently references the pseudo-sciences of the past, and our enduring fascination with the healing properties of religion and science, and for the role of Art in representing the acquisition of knowledge. One flank of the Unicorn lays bare the internal structure of the myth and our folly in the pursuit of anatomising our belief. By revealing the mortal flesh of the animal within, Hirst has cleverly inverted the purpose of such a study. The myth explored here is only deepened by the tantalising corporeality of this sculpture

Excerpt from the Press Release

Wilson continues to translate color and light into luminous and flawlessly calibrated abstractions. Wilson’s technique is straightforward – using drywall blades, rollers and masking tape he moves color around in controlled areas. The resulting compositions are elaborately layered squares, rectangles and lines of stunning color and radiance. Alternating between surfaces where the paint has been rolled on and where translucent layers are being pulled repeatedly over the surface, Wilson crates a spectacle of great beauty, in which the painting alternately offers resistance to the eye or pulls the viewer into glowing fields of brilliant depth. 

Link:
Susanne Vielmetter

 the big dissected companion sculpture in black was my favorite, of course.

Copy + Paste of the Press Release:

Honor Fraser is pleased to present Hold The Line, KAWS’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In a new group of paintings and sculpture, Brooklyn-based artist KAWS delivers stylized adaptations of visual icons in American animation.

Along with the existential emotive and psychotropic narrative avenues KAWS opens up for his altered versions of iconic animated characters, the artist’s works also provide the viewer with a richly rewarding and expansive formal consideration. Non-naturalistic color takes on new meaning in the case where there is no living, breathing, original referent for characters born of cell animation (such as SpongeBob SquarePants). Nevertheless, the unconventional palette in KAWS’s paintings–from high impact contrasts to monochromatic use of fluorescents, primaries, and darker tones–simultaneously defamiliarizes the ubiquitous characters while accentuating the reductive geometric play that abounds in their volumes and surfaces. In recent paintings, figures seem buoyed in the zero-gravity aftermath of a cartoon explosion, entangled in a dynamic composition of unmoored planks, bricks, or tentacles of color. In Hold The Line, a large group of tondo paintings feature extreme close-ups of the face of KAWSBob, a recurring subject in the works on canvas. The circular edges of the picture plane resonate with cartoonish facial features: the scaled-up, concisely-painted, hard-edged curves of eyelids, undulating nose, and blocky, rectangular teeth are zoomed and cropped to an extent that offers the face as a kind of color field. 

The artist adopts and upends conventions taken from popular animation. KAWS’s figures have long borne distinctive “x x” marks over their eyes–as if intoxicated, poisoned, or pushing daisies. Most characters, upon entering the KAWS lexicon, find their heads transformed into a puffy skull-and-crossbones. These visual reformulations can be found in what is perhaps KAWS’s signature figure, Companion, a Mickey Mouse-esque character that first appeared in a toy-edition in 1999, but which has since been produced in nearly every medium in which the wide-reaching artist works. At larger-than-human-scale, two new Companion sculptures refer to the artist’s recent work in monumental sculpture. Here, the figures project a vivacity, posture, and presence befitting a “look inside” the flawless toy-like surface of one of the artist’s most iconic characters.

The strong graphic identity fueling his practice enables the artist to extend his cadre of characters–Accomplice, Chum, Companion, KAWSBob, Kimpsons, Kurfs, and others–across boundless cultural platforms, from gallery and museum shows of his paintings and sculpture, to a broad range of collaborative engagements creating graphics and designs for magazines, products, apparel, and recording artists (such as Levi’s, Comme des Garçons, and Kanye West), to independently developing and distributing toy lines and other products in the dedicated KAWS boutique, OriginalFake, in Tokyo. 

Born in 1974 in New Jersey, KAWS graduated with a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has recently had solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Museum, Galerie Perrotin in Paris, and Galeria Javier Lopez in Madrid. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Torrrance Art Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Arts Center, San Francisco, and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. KAWS has upcoming solo exhibitions at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the High Museum in Atlanta. He has had four monographs published about his work, the most recent in 2010 by Skira/Rizzoli.

Links:
Honor Fraser
KAWS

Copy + Paste from MOCA:

Cy Twombly (b. 1928, Lexington, Virginia; d. 2011, Rome) was one of the masters of postwar painting, and his work has played a critical role in the international development of contemporary art. This exhibition, featuring works from the Broad Collection, spans the six decades of his career, tracing the evolution of his unique and highly personal visual language. When Twombly began painting in the early 1950s, Abstract Expressionism was the dominant aesthetic. Interested in cultivating the legacy of that movement, unlike contemporaries such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, he pursued a style that combined elements of abstraction, drawing, and writing and privileged the physical gesture of the artist’s hand over the representation of objects. “Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history,” said the artist. “It does not illustrate—it is the sensation of its own realization.”

Twombly came to New York in 1950 to study at the Art Students League, where he met Rauschenberg, who encouraged him to attend the small progressive art school Black Mountain College. Twombly enrolled there in 1952, working alongside artists including Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell as he continued to cultivate his expressive “handwriting” style. He began to integrate chalk, pencil, and crayon into his works, blurring the line between drawing and painting. Twombly was also employed by the United States Army as a cryptologist during the mid-1950s, and his interest in codes and symbols is evident in the development of his mark-making, which is often calligraphic, at times resembling an accumulation of graffiti.

In 1957, Twombly moved to Rome, where he resided for most of his life. There, his work began to bridge literary and painterly sensibilities, linking contemporary art to a rich cultural past of antiquity and Romanticism. Paintings of the 1960s, such as Untitled (Rome) (1961), made after the birth of his son, and Ilium (One Morning Ten Years Later) [Part I] (1964), are suffused with references to poetry, Mediterranean history, and mythology. In 1971, Nini Pirandello, the wife of Twombly’s Roman gallerist Plinio De Martiis, died suddenly. In tribute, Twombly painted the elegiac Nini’s Painting. Over the last decade, Twombly began revisiting the heroic scale of his 1950s works, making a body of paintings, including Untitled (from Blooming, A Scattering of Blossoms & Other Things) (2007) (the exhibition’s title references this work), which is among the most gestural, immersive, and explosively colorful in his career.

Link: MOCA

Her Artist Statement:

The face in the street reminds me of our connections with humanity, inspiring me to push the bounderies of portraiture with the aid of painterly contrasts. My compositions evolve through a personal quest to discover and understand colour. Striving to celebrate and flaunt the possibilities of paint, being the entity that engulfs the subject allowing for a free-flow of ideas to transpire uninhibited. Greatly influenced by Frank Auerbauch I rework my subject to gain a better possibility of producing the spontaneous mark. 

Link: Jenny Chisholm

]]> http://www.thekickitspot.com/2011/08/artist-talk-jane-lee-at-steve-turner-contemporary-wet-paint-3/feed/ 0 http://www.thekickitspot.com/2011/08/audi-rosemeyer-concept/ http://www.thekickitspot.com/2011/08/audi-rosemeyer-concept/#comments Tue, 23 Aug 2011 22:35:10 +0000 admin http://www.thekickitspot.com/?p=4159 During one of my bi-weekly stops to Costco to pick up groceries, I came upon this Maisto scale model of Audi’s concept car, the Rosemeyer. It was first unveiled in 2000 as a concept. For whatever reason, it never made it into production. Looking at it though, it does a bare a striking resemblance to the Bugatti Veyron; it’s even powered by a similar W-16 engine.

One look, and I immediately had to throw it in the shopping cart.

Of the few paintings she exhibited, this one, titled Thread Count,  is my favorite. It is the next evolution to the Drip Paintings series that she’s been pretty obsessed with for the past couple of years. Inspired by the world of fashion, design, and current trends,  Madame J has crafted works of art that embody her inimitable style.

Entering the gallery space, the art piece immediately commands attention. And at first glance, two things stand out –  its shape and the colors.

The art work evokes memories of high school Geometry and learning about parallelograms. Geometry is a polarizing subject and most everyone feels one way or the other about rhomboids and quadrilaterals. And however trite the reference, the intellectual trigger is powerful.

The vibrant colors reflects Madame’s subjects of interest, the world of fashion and the palette of the season. In addition, the multitude of colors serve well to highlight the meticulous process that went in to creating this work of art. On numerous occasions, I’ve heard passersby question aloud how the artist was able to apply the paint just so. Hint, a cooking utensil and gravity.

The texture is amazing. So fresh and so clean.

chilling.

candid moments. ha!

Links:

Steve Turner Contemporary Art
IlliteJ

…. working on some canvases for her next show.

There was a lot of amazing art up on the walls. Lazarides has a great eye for talent. One of my most favorites of the bunch is Antony Micallef, and prominently displayed in the middle of the main room were 3 of his sculptures. This one is titled, Weapon Face, part of the Idol Kids of Today series. It seems to be a smaller version of the larger, 12-ft one that was displayed at the Royal Academy in London.

Screenprint of Micallef’s Head. MSRP 1000USD….. Not bad.

Links:
Antony Micallef
Post No Bills 

JR.

JR and Faile took over the exterior of popular eatery, Gjelina.

Faile.

Vhils. This was actually created to highlight the “European Bailout” show.

Very Cool.

By the way, you’re not supposed to take photos of this exhibit (oops, I didn’t see the sign).

All 32 soup can canvases lined up and available for viewing in Los Angeles. The last time they were displayed in such a fashion was 49 years ago, at Irving Blum’s now-defunct Ferus Gallery on La Cienega! It was Andy Warhol’s first solo exhibition.

Now, to really appreciate the soup cans and the context does require some art history knowledge…..

and Wikipedia says it best (what’s bold is what I find interesting):

Warhol, a commercial illustrator who became a successful author, publisher, painter, and film director, showed the work on July 9, 1962 in his first one-man gallery exhibition as a fine artist.in the Ferus Gallery of Los Angeles, California. The exhibition marked the West Coast debut of pop art. The combination of the semi-mechanized process, the non-painterly style, and the commercial subject initially caused offense, as the work’s blatantly mundane commercialism represented a direct affront to the technique and philosophy of abstract expressionism. In the United States the abstract expressionism art movement was dominant during the post-war period, and it held not only to “fine art” values and aesthetics but also to a mystical inclination. This controversy led to a great deal of debate about the merits and ethics of such work. Warhol’s motives as an artist were questioned, and they continue to be topical to this day. The large public commotion helped transform Warhol from being an accomplished 1950s commercial illustrator to a notable fine artist, and it helped distinguish him from other rising pop artists. Although commercial demand for his paintings was not immediate, Warhol’s association with the subject led to his name becoming synonymous with the Campbell’s Soup can paintings.

Note written on the MOCA exhibition wall.

 Andy Warhol’s (b. 1928, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; d. 1987, New York) Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) is perhaps the most emblematic representation of his work and also of American pop art. Pop artists were interested in taking objects and images abundantly present in everyday life as their subjects, integrating popular culture into fine art. Making use of mechanical reproduction techniques and repetition, Warhol’s approach has been seen as cool and dispassionate. In the Campbell’s Soup Cans series, the works are also celebratory and nostalgic. Warhol reproduced the industrial look of the thirty-two soup-can labels by hand, although the fleur-de-lis motifs were mechanically printed and retain a quality that suggests mass production—an appearance seemingly at odds with the traditional notion of an artwork as a unique expression of the individual artist.

This presentation marks the first time Campbell’s Soup Cans has been shown in Los Angeles since its historic exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in July 1962, Warhol’s first solo show. In addition to celebrating one of the most influential exhibitions in the history of contemporary art, this project honors the legendary dealer Irving Blum, director of the Ferus Gallery, who gave Warhol his first solo exhibition. Blum has told the story that Warhol was reluctant to have his first exhibition in Los Angles rather than New York, and encouraged Warhol by telling him that “movie stars come to the gallery.” In fact, there was only a small Hollywood contingent that was part of the Los Angeles art world, including Dennis Hopper and a few of his friends, but Warhol was eventually convinced.

Blum sold several of the paintings for $100 each, but as the show was coming down, he realized that it was essential that all of the works be kept together. He asked the buyers whether they would consider canceling their purchases, and they agreed. Blum kept all thirtytwo Campbell’s Soup Cans in his collection until 1996, when they were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art as partial gift and purchase.

Entrance to the exhibit

As an aside, there has been much debate on what inspired Warhol to pick Campbell’s soup cans as the object of his foray into fine art. Some of the more amusing stories include the one being pitched by MoMA – that Warhol ate the stuff daily for 20 years. Yea, Warhol was an eccentric, but really?

It is refreshing then, to read art critic Christopher Knight’s theory – that Warhol was inspired by Willem de Kooning:

I have a different answer to the question “Why soup?” — one that I don’t believe has been proposed before now. It takes some explaining. But the short answer is this: Soup was essential studio slang, the conversational lingo among New York School painters when they talked about their work.

Specifically, soup was the metaphor used by Willem de Kooning — the most successful artist of the era — to characterize his robust Abstract Expressionism. If soup worked for him, why not for Warhol?

“Everything is already in art,” the painter [De Kooning] gently demurs. “Like a big bowl of soup. Everything is in there already, and you stick your hand in and you find something for you.”…

At 56, De Kooning stood at the pinnacle of New York’s art heap. Famously handsome, he was a bona fide artist-celebrity. In the words of his friend, the playwright and essayist Lionel Abel, walking with him through Greenwich Village was like “being with a movie star.” Heads turned and strangers stopped him in the street. It’s no surprise that Warhol, a wildly successful commercial artist in the 1950s who really wanted a fine art career, would soon decide that he should paint soup too. He set his considerable advertising skills to the task.

De Kooning’s influence on Warhol is seldom acknowledged, but his exalted stature would surely have been envied by the celebrity-obsessed younger artist, then 32. Such public eminence for a Modern American painter was virtually unprecedented. Warhol, employing a logic difficult to debate, soon chose soup’s most famous brand to sanctify in paint on canvas.

Anyways, back to the program……

There’s a large poster advertising the current exhibit. I think that it’s cool that it is very similar to the one that was displayed at the Ferrus Gallery. I hope they make smaller versions.

 Sure, the soup cans are ubiquitous in pop art (but that’s the point), and have become fodder for those inciting how “silly” art is. But again, to understand these works of art require an appreciation for art history, or just history in general. And if that’s not your thing, well then… you’re not very cool and can’t be my friend… kidding, kind of… not really.

Whether what was on displayed was art is debatable. I don’t think so, but I’ll save that discussion for another time.

For the true Tim Burton fan, I may recommend the show, but for the slightly curious or the art snobs, I’d point you to press pictures taken by The Fox is Black, Hypebeast, or Hi-fructose. You’ll get the gist of the show.

Nevertheless, one thing that I found impressive was that even though the show is one and a half-months in, it continues to draw a large crowd. Outside the pavilion, mid-afternoon, there were long lines of people snaking around the south and south east sides, waiting to get in. Fortunately, being a museum member allowed my friends and I to bypass the queue. If I had to wait, I’m sure my okay experience would instead have been pretty shitty.

Though I did take pictures with my phone, the museum policy is that there is no picture-taking allowed, which I’m sure is mainly due for crowd control.

….made me realize that I needed a haircut. ha!

It was pretty cool. Prior to the screening, we ate pizza and drank champagne.

Lulu and Dmitry. In Love.

They screened cult-classic Harold and Maude.

As the night went by, it got chilly. Thank goodness for the blankets. Afterwards, hung out around the fire.

It was all fun times.

Link: Cinespia

The show featured numerous sculptures made of old bricks. The featured piece, Pagoda, standing at 22-ft, had many guessing how on earth did they install this massive sculpture in that room. In the center was a stuffed pig.

According to the gallery notes (copy+paste):

Pagoda serves partly as a tribute to Zhu Gangqiang, or the “Cast-Iron Pig”, now famous for having survived 49 days in rubble, following China’s historic 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Upon hearing its story of survival, Zhang negotiated the pig’s purchase and has subsequently adopted him into his studio, employing a full-time caretaker and making his likeness a central part of his artistic practice. The number “49″ (from which the show takes its title) is dually significant, both for its relationship to Zhu Gangqiang’s story and for its connection to Buddhist thought, as the Buddhists believe 49 days is the amount of time ones soul remains on earth between death and reincarnation

There were many other sculptures, like these gigantic skulls, scattered throughout the gallery.

The exhibit is definitely worth a look!

Link: Blum and Poe

However, before and while waiting for the tour to start…. we do what we do best………..

so… we stuck around with the tour for about  half hour before going off on our own…..  to enjoy and interact with the art.

…. living in the moment…….

Lastly, I got Deitch to sign my book!

Woohoo! Planning to go back again this weekend.

anyways, here’s a picture of me with an instagram filter, trying on this amazing 1-button jacket by Japanese label, N. Hoolywood, at American Rag Cie.

..did you know that you’re not allowed to take pictures in the store? =X

Link:
N. Hoolywood

Colors in the work function as the composition. The black and white gessoed surfaces function as the symbolic color of intellectuality, and an idea of formality. The saturated colors of paint are a vital part of these paintings by disrupting surface. Paint is poured across the upper spine of the canvas, directly from the bottle. Gravitational force slowly draws the color down the length of the surface, leaving behind vertical lines of varying densities and widths.

….

Of the ten, these three were my favorite, and are a good representation of this latest collection.

during the show, it was funny how many commented that all of madame’s friends were so stylish….

..fresh from Miami…

in town visiting from Paris……

..leaving for Harvard.

soon to be Master…

monster on the loose…

after her talk, madame had a costume change……

..played around with the computer…

… when the last visitors left… the real fun began…

c’est tout.

It seemed like it was the event of the night… parking was very hard to come by, and the place was packed, disgustingly packed. Because of the crowds, my friends and I didn’t stay too long. I was able to do a quick walkthrough of the exhibit before the heat and repeated violations of personal space got to be too much…. From what I saw though, it definitely looked like a great show. My friends and I are going to come back later………….

Unfortunately, I only had my iphone to take pictures….

The LA Times did a pretty decent review of the show >>here<<

me.. “Going apeshit over KAWS”………. was searching for the Black one..

Link: Born to Be Wild

madame.. and her shoes… i think it’s a bowtie?

you’re not allowed to take photos inside… so, well.. =X … had to be extra sneaky with the iphone.

of the 20 dresses, this was my favorite and one that i could see the madame wearing… it was also pretty cool to see the tutus from the Black Swan film.

when we left, it got pretty packed with a lot of fashionistas and fashionistos…

and off we went to dinner…

ciao…

Link: Rodarte

The Italian in los angeles.

the day they actually allowed photo taking on the 3rd level….my camera’s battery died… last photo.

took a few snaps with the iphone, but the pictures came out all blurry………bleh.

Carlos Cruz Diez

Julio Le Parc

Copy + Paste from MOCA:

Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space, is the first museum exhibition to situate pioneering Latin American artists among the international canon of those working with light and space. The exhibition presents Latin America as the source of new ideas about the nature and function of art through the re-creation of important large scale installations by five highly regarded and influential artists: Carlos Cruz Diez, Lucio Fontana, Julio Le Parc, Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida, and Jesús Rafael Soto. The exhibition aims to illuminate the field by expanding the dialogue surrounding light-and-space practices in contemporary visual art beyond the California tradition of the late ’60s and ’70s, to include pivotal Latin American impulses expressed more than a decade earlier.

The five large-scale environments on view in Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space exemplify the artists’ embrace of light, color, and space as art materials as well as their interest in forging a new object-viewer relationship. Conceiving works that require the active participation of the viewer, each sought to engender a sensory experience of art that goes beyond the aesthetic. This immersive encounter, which Oiticica described as “suprasensorial,” was intended to shift the viewer’s position vis-a-vis the artwork, bridging the distance between spectator and object, demystifying art by making it part of everyday life. The viewer no longer need stand in front of an artwork, as with painting, or walk around it, in the case of sculpture, but should enter it, becoming fully engaged in a kind of “sensorial exaltation.” Insisting on the viewer’s presence as necessary for the completion of the work, each of the artists in Suprasensorial makes him/her an indispensable part of the art-making process.

Link: MOCA

Notice that no one is looking at the prismatic sculpture, not even the Ace employee standing to guard it. Curatorial fail.

Perhaps it’s because Super Bowl buzz is in the air, but while looking at the sculpture, I fantasized that a burly, football player would enter the space and run directly towards the column, knocking over the Ace gallery attendant and also sending the art object crashing over…. that would have been AWESOME!

Copy + Paste from Ace Gallery:

“The column was an indication of my wanting to get out and treat the environment itself, I don’t mean in the sense of building buildings or being an architect, but rather of dealing with the quality of a particular space in terms of its weight, its temperature, its tactileness, its density, its feel – all those semi-intangible things that we don’t normally deal with.”
- Robert Irwin1

In 1970, Robert Irwin simplified his Venice, California studio, transforming it into a pristine space where he installed one work: a twelve-foot, clear acrylic column near the center of the room. With all distractions removed, Irwin’s spacious studio and solitary sculpture presented a viewer with a visual silence, a pure situational experience.
ACE Gallery Beverly Hills installs a similar yet taller column, over 19 feet in height, in its main exhibition space, once again the only artwork in the space. Irwin’s experiments in light and space have dominated his artistic practice since he switched to a more proto-installation type of art. Irwin’s investigations go beyond the properties of light and space and into the intrapersonal, a psychological examination on the part of the viewer into what it means to be present. The viewer’s experience is paramount; beyond creating an environment, Irwin invites the individual to confront his or her perceptions on space. As MOMA’s former chief curator Kirk Varnedoe referenced in his lectures on abstract art: “Irwin has controlled and composed the act of perception itself.”2 Irwin is regarded as one of the preeminent pioneers of California Minimalism and the Los Angeles Light and Space movement, yet also his attention to location and viewer’s affect establishes him as a forefather of site-specificity and relational aesthetics.

Irwin’s Untitled (1970) column is simultaneously present yet seemingly absent. The sculpture is so limpid that even while looking directly at it, the column or anything behind it could disappear with one movement of the visitor. Irwin has accomplished a monumental feat with his column by creating an object that could perceivably exist one moment and not the next. Yves Klein’s piece The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State of Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void (April 1958), and John Cage’s musical composition 4’33″ (1952) presented their audiences with a setting to experience art but gave nothing concrete to focus on but the immediate surround. Irwin employs the same gesture in a very different manner by creating a “whole room situation,” where the perceptual phenomenological experience is activated by the position of the viewer in relation to the sculpture.3 To look at the piece is to look through the piece and thus at the architecture and other viewers in the space with the column. Where one viewer has a singular experience with the sculpture, additional individuals compound the experience further. Not only is the prismatic column reflective and transparent, but also refractive, ultimately splitting the individual(s) and surrounding architecture into fragmented planes, creating an ever-changing situational experience. Not intended as the focal point of any room, the column can sit off center, or in the periphery. The artwork acts as a structure from which the viewer may build upon his or her own presumptions about optics and what it means to view objects and spaces.

Later in 1970, Irwin took his spatial studies further with an exhibition at ACE Gallery in Westwood, California entitled Experimental Situation (1970), where he emptied the gallery entirely and made daily visits for a period of a month filling the space only with his artistic contemplation. The process of Irwin’s creative thought became the final product; this conceptual and spiritual gesture became almost palpable. The following year he created a work where ACEÕs exhibition space was distorted slightly with the use of a sheer scrim in almost a ghostly fashion. Of separate historical note, that same year Irwin ceased making artworks in the studio and shifted his focus to site-specific installations, at which point ACE Gallery moved its location to what became Irwin’s former studio in Venice, California.

Robert Irwin is one of California’s most pivotal and influential artists from the post-war era, who contributed immensely to put Los Angeles on the map at a time when New York dominated the global art scene. At a time when West Coast Light and Space artists were exploring the facets of light, space, and finish – three things distinct to the sprawling, sunshine-filled, and car heavy Los Angeles – a group of artists on the East Coast were reducing the languages of sculpture and painting to their most basic elements creating Minimalism. Irwin has had numerous international museum exhibitions as well as two major site-specific commissions of note: The Central Garden, an artwork in the form of a garden at the Getty Museum, and The Palm Garden at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Born in 1928 in Long Beach, California, Robert Irwin currently lives and works in San Diego, CA.
1 Lawrence Weschler and Robert Irwin. Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: a Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin. Berkeley: University of California, 1982. 114.
2 Varnedoe, Kirk. Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock (A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts). Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006.
3 Weschler and Irwin. 112.

When lighted from above, Pashgian’s columns emanated a soft glow that not only brought them to life, but also revealed the simple genius of the construction. Considering that they look like large frosty glass vases that you could get from DWR or even Ikea, I found the floor and ceiling layout to be effective in setting the mood that many night clubs and after-hours lounges aspire to. Indeed, the crowd found the ambience perfect for imbibing in free booze and engaging in conversation.

Upon reflection, standing in that room was both calming and inspirational. Even if it was just for a moment, I did find myself focused on the colors and forgetting about reality. Perhaps, that is the reason for these sculptures’ existance, to stir the imagination and transport one to a mental place of peace, or maybe I just suffer from inattentive ADHD. 

Anyways, the opening was okay. My main complaint is that the line to get alcohol was a bit too long.

Copy + Paste from Ace Gallery:

While meticulously constructed, the artwork of Helen Pashgian shows no trace of the artist’s hand at work; instead, it concentrates on the final impression. The artist’s intimate, small in scale works are enigmatic studies of light and color. Her larger pieces are inexplicable; they seem supernaturally constructed and perfect Stonehenges of bent light. While using light and color as exploratory materials, Pashgian has created ethereal works from industrial materials for her exhibition at Ace Gallery Beverly Hills. As stated by James Turrell, “Helen Pashgian is a pioneer of the Los Angeles ‘Light and Space’ movement… [She] had the ironic stance of working in such a light drenched arena while maintaining the position of being an underground artist… [Her] efforts are now known.”¹ Pashgian, amid other artists working in Los Angeles in the late sixties such as Turrell, Robert Irwin, Mary Corse, DeWain Valentine, Doug Wheeler, Larry Bell, and Peter Alexander, has investigated the properties of light in solid form for close to fifty years. Pashgian’s work may vary greatly in scale, yet regardless of size, her sculptures remain pristine and mysterious.

Pashgian has recently created a series of eight-foot tall freestanding columns that take the form of vertical double-ellipses. Every column acts as conjoined twins, which elliptically fall in and out of each other into infinity. There is no end nor beginning, rather an envelopment of space and all that inhabit it. By making these sculptures large-scale, Pashgian has created a multitude of angles with which to play with light. The columns are not just pure, self-supporting, luminescent color, but rather Pashgian has placed varying elements into the columns that change as viewers engage them from different approaches. The elements inside, whether they are a flat bar, metallic cylinder, or untraceable color, might appear to be an armature, but as each differs, no solid conclusions can be drawn. Baffling as the construction is, Pashgian has created tactile color with inner light sources emanating from the sculptures.

Similar to her columns, the wall pieces have varying elements contained within; however, unlike her columns, Pashgian’s wall works float. There is no clear way that they are fashioned to the wall. The enclosed elements not only appear to be shadows but cast shadows from within the pieces. As Kathleen Stuart Howe put it, “These interior elements at one moment capture a burst of light, then, as one moves around the sculptures, become solid forms that seem to push against the diaphanous surface… only to subside and dissolve into a ghostly presence.”²

In juxtaposition to her larger works, Pashgian’s small, twelve-inch squares are filled with intriguing contradictions: each contains a sense of movement yet each is at a standstill, each is small in size yet implies grandiosity, each is predominately black yet colors come forth, and each is flat yet sculptural in nature. She takes what could be from a viewfinder, and frames it with a square, making for an intimate dynamic experience. There is a strong sense of movement within these smaller works – a blurring effect, trails of light following larger sources – but at the same time there is an uncanny stillness, as if she has trapped light in a frame. Light may be as old as time, yet Pashgian has found a way to reinvent how we look at it, taking a relatively small space and rendering it vast and expansive. In slight relief, she has layered her boxes, condensing luminance and giving the impression of three-dimensions. Even though focused lighting may enhance the pieces, she has found a way to make colors glow in a natural light.

Pashgian does not reveal how her works come to fruition; instead, she leaves the viewer with what is there. Be they matte or so shiny that they glow, there is an obsession with texture and craft so strong and perfect that it is apparent that the artist has planned every inch of every piece.

¹ Turrell, James. Foreword. Helen Pashgian: Working in Light. Claremont, CA: Pomona College Museum of Art, 2010. Print. 5.
² Howe, Kathleen Stewart. Helen Pashgian: Working in Light. Claremont, CA: Pomona College Museum of Art, 2010. Print. 10.

Copy + Paste:

Most of us make the same mistake with our money over and over again: We buy high out of greed and sell low out of fear, despite knowing on an intellectual level that it is a very bad idea.

The easiest way to see this behavior in action is to watch money flow in and out of mutual funds. Let’s go back to early 2000. The dot-com market had reached a fevered pitch. People were using their home equity to buy tech stocks right after the NASDAQ had a single year return of better than 80 percent!

Then, in January 2000, investors put close to $44 billion dollars into stock mutual funds, according to the Investment Company Institute, shattering the previous one-month record of $28.5 billion. We all know the story from there. Money continued to pour into stock funds, breaking records for February and March and pushing the NASDAQ to 5,000, only to lose half its value by October 2002.

This gets worse. That same October (at the low for the cycle), as investors were selling stocks as fast as they could, where was all the money going? Into bond funds, at a time when bond prices were near record highs.

Think about this pattern for a minute. At the top of the market we can’t buy fast enough. About three years later at the bottom, we can’t sell fast enough. And we repeat that over and over until we’re broke. No wonder most people are unsatisfied with their investing experience.

Now we might be doing it again. Over the last year, investors have put an estimated $506 billion into mutual funds, but $409 billion of that went into bond funds. Let me repeat that: Of the total of over $506 billion, $409 billion went into bond funds.

No one is sure how this will turn out. But with interest rates again near record lows (meaning bond prices are near record highs), you could end up losing money in that bond fund you bought for the purpose of making sure you don’t lose money.

To be clear, the solution here is not to sell your bond funds. It is not to buy stock funds. The point is to recognize that, in aggregate, investors tend to be very bad at timing the market.

It makes far more sense to ignore what the crowd is doing and base your investment decisions on what you need to reach your goals, then stick with the plan despite the fear or greed you may feel. To do otherwise would be following a pattern that has proven to be extraordinarily painful.

Link: Carl Richards

Link: Chris Anthony

It comes with an AMG-built 700 hp 6-L twin-turbocharged V12…FTW! I also really like the side mirrors.

Drooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool.

show notes.

The artist is Blu. One of my favorites. Instantly recognizable.

Paris.

Scary

How it was all laid out.

Copy + Paste of the Press Release:

Street Art: Photographic Elevations of Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin by Larry Yust Opens Sept. 19 at the Fowler Museum at UCLA

Since 2002, filmmaker and photographer Larry Yust has created what he calls “photographic elevations,” long, horizontal perspectives of metropolitan streetscapes. In Street Art: Photographic Elevations of Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin by Larry Yust—on display at the Fowler from Sept. 19, 2010–Jan. 16, 2011—Yust applies his panoramic perspective to emergent, often controversial art forms that appear on the streets of Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin.

With this body of work Yust explores how red-brick warehouse facades, cinderblock walls lining thoroughfares, wooden barriers at construction sites, and fences surrounding vacant lots become prominent sites for open-air, and largely unofficial, artistic expression. The large, colorful prints—measuring from six to more than twenty feet in length—present richly detailed views of popular, and often overlapping, urban decorative styles: aerosol art (murals and graffiti), storefront signage and commercial advertising, and the creatively ordered display of merchandise and personal possessions.

Included are blocks-long images that intriguingly juxtapose the highly commercialized signage of Hollywood Boulevard with graffiti coated walls found throughout Southern California; the mural-covered remnants of the Berlin Wall with elaborately decorated exteriors of artist’s collectives in Germany’s capital; and the wildly painted delivery trucks of Paris’ Place d’Aligre market with the stunning open-air aerosol artworks presented at the city’s Musée d’Art Moderne (Palais de Tokyo).

Yust provides distinctive and telling observations of the urban landscape, but also reframes discourses about how street artists and others use the built environment as a display space or canvas, with or without permission. Do the photographic elevations fashioned by Yust depict a raw, essential artistic impulse that enhances our experience of the city? Or are we looking at visual noise and evidence of vandalism that detracts from an ideal urban aesthetic? What makes a street or a wall attractive?

Yust makes his compelling images by snapping overlapping photographs of blocks of storefronts and buildings, ensuring that the plane of the camera lens and the plane of the subject always remain parallel. He records numerous pictures for each elevation, and then digitally composes them into one long seamless image, rendering a perspective that cannot be captured by other photographic techniques or even the naked eye.

About the Artist
Larry Yust began taking photographs while scouting locations as a filmmaker, a career launched as the writer/director/producer of a series of dramatizations of classic short stories and plays for Encyclopaedia Britannica Films. He has written and directed feature films and for television, and his photographs appear in the books Salvation Mountain: The Art of Leonard Knight and METRO, a collection of his photographic elevations of Paris Metro stations. His work was the subject of the 2004 Fowler exhibition Street Seen: Photographic Elevations of Los Angeles by Larry Yust.

Additional Information
Street Art: Photographic Elevations of Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin by Larry Yust will be on view in the Fowler Museum’s Goldenberg Galleria. This exhibition is curated by Patrick A. Polk, the Fowler Museum’s curator of Latin American and Caribbean popular arts. A book is being published in conjunction with the exhibition (ISBN 978-0-9778344-4-0). This exhibition and publication are made possible by a generous grant from the Lloyd E. Rigler—Lawrence E. Deutsch Foundation.

The Fowler Museum at UCLA is one of the country’s most respected institutions devoted to exploring the arts and cultures of Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas. The Fowler is open Wednesdays through Sundays, from noon to 5 p.m.; and on Thursdays, from noon until 8 p.m. The museum is closed Mondays and Tuesdays. The Fowler Museum, part of UCLA Arts, is located in the north part of the UCLA campus. Admission is free. Parking is available for a maximum of $10 in Lot 4. For more information, the public may call 310/825-4361 or visit fowler.ucla.edu.

Opening Day Event:
September 19, 2010 2 and 4 pm
Exhibition Tours of Street Art with Larry Yust

Copy + Paste from the Catalogue:

Acquired prior to the breakthrough travelling exhibition in 1965 and executed at the very height of Francis Bacon’s phenomenal career, Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud serves as testament to one of the most impressive artistic relationships of the Twentieth Century. In the 1950s and 1960s Bacon and Freud, then widely recognised as Britain’s pre-eminent painters, met incessantly and were considered inseparable. From 1961 Bacon employed this fourteen by twelve inches canvas size exclusively for an epic portraiture cycle that depicted a coterie of close friends in a project that occupied him until the end of his life. While his friend Frank Auerbach has likened these fantastic portrayals to “risen spirits” John Russell has commented that “Just as a gunshot sometimes leaves an after-echo or parallel report, so these small concentrated heads carry their ghosts within them” (John Russell, Francis Bacon , London 1993, p. 99 and p. 152). Among these phenomenal character investigations, the brilliant colour, dramatic brushstrokes and analysis of facial landscape across the three canvases of the present work are truly exceptional. Highlights converge and dissemble to describe passages of light across the three versions of Freud’s visage: just as our eye is attracted to the seeming organisation of one area it immediately shoots to the apparent dissolution of another.

Lucian Freud had first learned about Francis Bacon from Graham Sutherland towards the end of the Second World War, and the pair thereafter became close friends, even seeing each other on a daily basis for a time. Freud painted his extraordinary portrait Francis Bacon in oil on copper in 1952, conjuring an intangible air of distracted distance in the face of his friend which so perfectly narrates the dimensions of their unconventional friendship. Two years later in 1954 the pair represented Britain, together with Ben Nicholson, at the Venice Biennale, firmly cementing their reputations at the vanguard of contemporary painting. Having started with the large Portrait of Lucian Freud in 1951, Bacon created paintings that included Freud in their titles for over twenty years, and the shadow of his unnamed presence long after that. However, the present work contains an intensity and intimacy that is rarely seen elsewhere, together with the paint handling that defines Bacon’s inimitable masterworks. It is archetypal of Bacon’s seminal cycle of triptych portrait heads, capturing an intense presence in mid-movement. This is Bacon’s detached yet doting depiction of one of his closest friends and a true artistic companion, and it confirms David Sylvester’s description that “Bacon had something of Picasso’s genius for transforming his autobiography into images with a mythic allure and weight” (David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon , London 2000, p. 186).

Overlapping matrices of paint hatching, partly imprinted with Bacon’s idiosyncratic use of corduroy material, describe the modulations of texture across the subject’s faces, while Freud’s stylishly dishevelled hair is variously presented with dragged streaks of dry pigment. Bacon’s extraordinary aptitude to shift through different modes of execution, from exactitude to expressivity, from the diagrammatic to the painterly, is here exhibited at its instinctive best. Bacon’s portraiture is critically-defined and world-renowned for achieving uncanny likeness via a seemingly chaotic assault of violent brushstrokes. Between the rich paint strata here he has buried a deep affection for Freud, which slowly reveals itself together with the gradual appearance of the sitter’s character on the surface of the canvas.

The portrait is loaded with physicality, both literally with the weight of oil paint and as the material record of the artist’s own brutal assault. Out of a flurry of swipes and blows Freud’s unmistakable presence emerges: with each loaded stroke on the three canvases this most focused of portraits unravels the sitter’s psychological and emotional kernel across the surfaces. It is almost as if Bacon has attempted to hide this face and to camouflage it in paint, yet suffers the burden of knowing it too well to conceal its true identity. It is often noted that Bacon’s portraits reveal their sitter’s inner essence because he painted people he knew closely, and at this time Lucian Freud was perhaps the closest that Francis Bacon ever had to a likeminded artistic equal.

The variegated textures of the surfaces recount the story of this work’s creation: the artist has brushed, smeared, flicked, lifted and thrown paint in his drive to define likeness; scraping, reworking, and layering to impregnate the painting with both painterly and psychological depth. While the powerful scarlet reds introduce a radical charge of colour, the sinuous sweeps of highly viscous strokes define the topography of Freud’s physiognomy in a rhythmic pattern of textural variety. All this is set against a backdrop of depthless black, coarsely woven canvas that results in the sculptural character of bitumen. Bacon’s rich hues have been soaked into the absorbent unprimed canvas, which contrasts brilliantly with the explosive plasticity of the impasto.

While the renowned critic and Bacon’s great friend Michel Leiris describes the artist’s portraits in strictly corporeal terms; “his work carries the signs of his actions rather as a person’s flesh bears the scars of an accident or an attack” (Michel Leiris in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Marlborough Fine Art, Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings, p. 17), William Feaver appraises them as figures of speech: “Here we have the slap round the chops. Then a good seeing-to, followed by a succession of abrupt images; gobsmacked, browbeaten, dumped on, coldshouldered” (William Feaver in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Marlborough Fine Art, Francis Bacon 1909-1992: Small Portrait Studies, 1993, n.p.). Because we see several aspects and angles of Freud’s head all at once we are confronted by his character as a whole, rather than one specific snapshot. The representation is like an over-exposed photograph, or even some constantly adjusting oil-based hologram acting as a psychosomatic X-ray. Left on the canvas is the residue of the artist’s impulsive action, simultaneously trapping different facets of facial expression and a sense of movement. However, rather than merely the few moments of a time-delayed photo, Bacon has caught Freud’s character as he observed him over years, and thus the painting holds within it time, experience and the shadows of memory itself.

The celebrated Czech writer Milan Kundera has commented that “Bacon’s portraits are the interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved being still remain a beloved being?” (Milan Kundera, Bacon: Portraits and Self-Portraits, London 1996, p. 12). Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud is an outstanding example of Bacon reaching that critical threshold between recognition and dissolution. He has navigated the precise point at which this head reveals both the character of Lucian Freud and the raw and seemingly arbitrary convergence of paint and brushstrokes. Indeed, within its extraordinary layers of execution lies the key to Bacon’s portraiture project, as he defined to Hugh Davies in 1973: “In trying to paint a portrait I would like it to be all likeness – I would like it to be a universal image as well as a specific fact” (the artist interviewed by Hugh Davies, 7 th August 1973, cited in: Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Francis Bacon, New York 1986, p. 45).

Showed up too late. Got kicked out of the museum. hahahaha.

- Rapha Winter Jersey, $230. Can also wear it as a light jacket.
- The Quants by Scott Patterson, $17.82 at Amazon.
- Framed Print of Untitled (Red and Black), 1955 by Mark Rothko, $200 at MoMA.
- Sidi Dragon 2 SRS Carbon Mountain Bike Shoes in Red, $372.50 at Chainreactioncycles. Retails for $465.
- Paddle Shifting Steering Wheel for my car, $2,095 at Suncoast. Retails for $2615.
- Decoded by Jay-Z, $18.88 at Amazon.
- Vision Racer VR3 Racing Simulator, $1295. The best way to play Gran Turismo.
- Rapha 3/4 Bib shorts, $225. I’m a sucker for that white stripe.

Cheers!

Copy + Paste of his 1939 Essay:

I

ONE AND THE SAME civilization produces simultaneously two such different things s a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and products of the same society. Here, however, their connection seems to end. A poem by Eliot and a poem by Eddie Guest — what perspective of culture is large enough to enable us to situate them in an enlightening relation to each other? Does the fact that a disparity such as this within the frame of a single cultural tradition, which is and has been taken for granted — does this fact indicate that the disparity is a part of the natural order of things? Or is it something entirely new, and particular to our age?

The answer involves more than an investigation in aesthetics. It appears to me that it is necessary to examine more closely and with more originality than hitherto the relationship between aesthetic experience as met by the specific — not the generalized — individual, and the social and historical contexts in which that experience takes place. What is brought to light will answer, in addition to the question posed above, other and perhaps more important questions.

A society, as it becomes less and less able, in the course of its development, to justify the inevitability of its particular forms, breaks up the accepted notions upon which artists and writers must depend in large part for communication with their audiences. It becomes difficult to assume anything. All the verities involved by religion, authority, tradition, style, are thrown into question, and the writer or artist is no longer able to estimate the response of his audience to the symbols and references with which he works. In the past such a state of affairs has usually resolved itself into a motionless Alexandrianism, an academicism in which the really important issues are left untouched because they involve controversy, and in which creative activity dwindles to virtuosity in the small details of form, all larger questions being decided by the precedent of the old masters. The same themes are mechanically varied in a hundred different works, and yet nothing new is produced: Statius, mandarin verse, Roman sculpture, Beaux-Arts painting, neo-republican architecture.

It is among the hopeful signs in the midst of the decay of our present society that we — some of us — have been unwilling to accept this last phase for our own culture. In seeking to go beyond Alexandrianism, a part of Western bourgeois society has produced something unheard of heretofore: — avant-garde culture. A superior consciousness of history — more precisely, the appearance of a new kind of criticism of society, an historical criticism — made this possible. This criticism has not confronted our present society with timeless utopias, but has soberly examined in the terms of history and of cause and effect the antecedents, justifications and functions of the forms that lie at the heart of every society. Thus our present bourgeois social order was shown to be, not an eternal, “natural” condition of life, but simply the latest term in a succession of social orders. New perspectives of this kind, becoming a part of the advanced intellectual conscience of the fifth and sixth decades of the nineteenth century, soon were absorbed by artists and poets, even if unconsciously for the most part. It was no accident, therefore, that the birth of the avant-garde coincided chronologically — and geographically, too — with the first bold development of scientific revolutionary thought in Europe.

True, the first settlers of bohemia — which was then identical with the avant-garde — turned out soon to be demonstratively uninterested in politics. Nevertheless, without the circulation of revolutionary ideas in the air about them, they would never have been able to isolate their concept of the “bourgeois” in order to define what they were not. Nor, without the moral aid of revolutionary political attitudes would they have had the courage to assert themselves as aggressively as they did against the prevailing standards of society. Courage indeed was needed for this, because the avant-garde’s emigration from bourgeois society to bohemia meant also an emigration from the markets of capitalism, upon which artists and writers had been thrown by the falling away of aristocratic patronage. (Ostensibly, at least, it meant this — meant starving in a garret — although, as we will be shown later, the avant-garde remained attached to bourgeois society precisely because it needed its money.)

Yet it is true that once the avant-garde had succeeded in “detaching” itself from society, it proceeded to turn around and repudiate revolutionary as well as bourgeois politics. The revolution was left inside society, a part of that welter of ideological struggle which art and poetry find so unpropitious as soon as it begins to involve those “precious” axiomatic beliefs upon which culture thus far has had to rest. Hence it developed that the true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to “experiment,” but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence. Retiring from public altogether, the avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the point. “Art for art’s sake” and “pure poetry” appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague.

It has been in search of the absolute that the avant-garde has arrived at “abstract” or “nonobjective” art — and poetry, too. The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape — not its picture — is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.

But the absolute is absolute, and the poet or artist, being what he is, cherishes certain relative values more than others. The very values in the name of which he invokes the absolute are relative values, the values of aesthetics. And so he turns out to be imitating, not God — and here I use “imitate” in its Aristotelian sense — but the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves. This is the genesis of the “abstract.”(1) In turning his attention away from subject matter of common experience, the poet or artist turns it in upon the medium of his own craft. The nonrepresentational or “abstract,” if it is to have aesthetic validity, cannot be arbitrary and accidental, but must stem from obedience to some worthy constraint or original. This constraint, once the world of common, extroverted experience has been renounced, can only be found in the very processes or disciplines by which art and literature have already imitated the former. These themselves become the subject matter of art and literature. If, to continue with Aristotle, all art and literature are imitation, then what we have here is the imitation of imitating. To quote Yeats:

Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence.

Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cézanne derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in.(2) The excitement of their art seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors. The attention of poets like Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, Éluard, Pound, Hart Crane, Stevens, even Rilke and Yeats, appears to be centered on the effort to create poetry and on the “moments” themselves of poetic conversion, rather than on experience to be converted into poetry. Of course, this cannot exclude other preoccupations in their work, for poetry must deal with words, and words must communicate. Certain poets, such as Mallarmé and Valéry (3) are more radical in this respect than others — leaving aside those poets who have tried to compose poetry in pure sound alone. However, if it were easier to define poetry, modern poetry would be much more “pure” and “abstract.” As for the other fields of literature — the definition of avant-garde aesthetics advanced here is no Procrustean bed. But aside from the fact that most of our best contemporary novelists have gone to school with the avant-garde, it is significant that Gide’s most ambitious book is a novel about the writing of a novel, and that Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake seem to be, above all, as one French critic says, the reduction of experience to expression for the sake of expression, the expression mattering more than what is being expressed.

That avant-garde culture is the imitation of imitating — the fact itself — calls for neither approval nor disapproval. It is true that this culture contains within itself some of the very Alexandrianism it seeks to overcome. The lines quoted from Yeats referred to Byzantium, which is very close to Alexandria; and in a sense this imitation of imitating is a superior sort of Alexandrianism. But there is one most important difference: the avant-garde moves, while Alexandrianism stands still. And this, precisely, is what justifies the avant-garde’s methods and makes them necessary. The necessity lies in the fact that by no other means is it possible today to create art and literature of a high order. To quarrel with necessity by throwing about terms like “formalism,” “purism,” “ivory tower” and so forth is either dull or dishonest. This is not to say, however, that it is to the social advantage of the avant-garde that it is what it is. Quite the opposite.

The avant-garde’s specialization of itself, the fact that its best artists are artists’ artists, its best poets, poets’ poets, has estranged a great many of those who were capable formerly of enjoying and appreciating ambitious art and literature, but who are now unwilling or unable to acquire an initiation into their craft secrets. The masses have always remained more or less indifferent to culture in the process of development. But today such culture is being abandoned by those to whom it actually belongs — our ruling class. For it is to the latter that the avant-garde belongs. No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold. The paradox is real. And now this elite is rapidly shrinking. Since the avant-garde forms the only living culture we now have, the survival in the near future of culture in general is thus threatened.

We must not be deceived by superficial phenomena and local successes. Picasso’s shows still draw crowds, and T. S. Eliot is taught in the universities; the dealers in modernist art are still in business, and the publishers still publish some “difficult” poetry. But the avant-garde itself, already sensing the danger, is becoming more and more timid every day that passes. Academicism and commercialism are appearing in the strangest places. This can mean only one thing: that the avant-garde is becoming unsure of the audience it depends on — the rich and the cultivated.

Is it the nature itself of avant-garde culture that is alone responsible for the danger it finds itself in? Or is that only a dangerous liability? Are there other, and perhaps more important, factors involved?

II

Where there is an avant-garde, generally we also find a rear-guard. True enough — simultaneously with the entrance of the avant-garde, a second new cultural phenomenon appeared in the industrial West: that thing to which the Germans give the wonderful name of Kitsch: popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc. For some reason this gigantic apparition has always been taken for granted. It is time we looked into its whys and wherefores.

Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy.

Prior to this the only market for formal culture, as distinguished from folk culture, had been among those who, in addition to being able to read and write, could command the leisure and comfort that always goes hand in hand with cultivation of some sort. This until then had been inextricably associated with literacy. But with the introduction of universal literacy, the ability to read and write became almost a minor skill like driving a car, and it no longer served to distinguish an individual’s cultural inclinations, since it was no longer the exclusive concomitant of refined tastes.

The peasants who settled in the cities as proletariat and petty bourgeois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency, but they did not win the leisure and comfort necessary for the enjoyment of the city’s traditional culture. Losing, nevertheless, their taste for the folk culture whose background was the countryside, and discovering a new capacity for boredom at the same time, the new urban masses set up a pressure on society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for their own consumption. To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide.

Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money — not even their time.

The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws its life blood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience. This is what is really meant when it is said that the popular art and literature of today were once the daring, esoteric art and literature of yesterday. Of course, no such thing is true. What is meant is that when enough time has elapsed the new is looted for new “twists,” which are then watered down and served up as kitsch. Self-evidently, all kitsch is academic; and conversely, all that’s academic is kitsch. For what is called the academic as such no longer has an independent existence, but has become the stuffed-shirt “front” for kitsch. The methods of industrialism displace the handicrafts.

Because it can be turned out mechanically, kitsch has become an integral part of our productive system in a way in which true culture could never be, except accidentally. It has been capitalized at a tremendous investment which must show commensurate returns; it is compelled to extend as well as to keep its markets. While it is essentially its own salesman, a great sales apparatus has nevertheless been created for it, which brings pressure to bear on every member of society. Traps are laid even in those areas, so to speak, that are the preserves of genuine culture. It is not enough today, in a country like ours, to have an inclination towards the latter; one must have a true passion for it that will give him the power to resist the faked article that surrounds and presses in on him from the moment he is old enough to look at the funny papers. Kitsch is deceptive. It has many different levels, and some of them are high enough to be dangerous to the naive seeker of true light. A magazine like the New Yorker, which is fundamentally high-class kitsch for the luxury trade, converts and waters down a great deal of avant-garde material for its own uses. Nor is every single item of kitsch altogether worthless. Now and then it produces something of merit, something that has an authentic folk flavor; and these accidental and isolated instances have fooled people who should know better.

Kitsch’s enormous profits are a source of temptation to the avant-garde itself, and its members have not always resisted this temptation. Ambitious writers and artists will modify their work under the pressure of kitsch, if they do not succumb to it entirely. And then those puzzling borderline cases appear, such as the popular novelist, Simenon, in France, and Steinbeck in this country. The net result is always to the detriment of true culture in any case.

Kitsch has not been confined to the cities in which it was born, but has flowed out over the countryside, wiping out folk culture. Nor has it shown any regard for geographical and national cultural boundaries. Another mass product of Western industrialism, it has gone on a triumphal tour of the world, crowding out and defacing native cultures in one colonial country after another, so that it is now by way of becoming a universal culture, the first universal culture ever beheld. Today the native of China, no less than the South American Indian, the Hindu, no less than the Polynesian, have come to prefer to the products of their native art, magazine covers, rotogravure sections and calendar girls. How is this virulence of kitsch, this irresistible attractiveness, to be explained? Naturally, machine-made kitsch can undersell the native handmade article, and the prestige of the West also helps; but why is kitsch a so much more profitable export article than Rembrandt? One, after all, can be reproduced as cheaply as the other.

In his last article on the Soviet cinema in the Partisan Review, Dwight Macdonald points out that kitsch has in the last ten years become the dominant culture in Soviet Russia. For this he blames the political regime — not only for the fact that kitsch is the official culture, but also that it is actually the dominant, most popular culture, and he quotes the following from Kurt London’s The Seven Soviet Arts: “. . . the attitude of the masses both to the old and new art styles probably remains essentially dependent on the nature of the education afforded them by their respective states.” Macdonald goes on to say: “Why after all should ignorant peasants prefer Repin (a leading exponent of Russian academic kitsch in painting) to Picasso, whose abstract technique is at least as relevant to their own primitive folk art as is the former’s realistic style? No, if the masses crowd into the Tretyakov (Moscow’s museum of contemporary Russian art: kitsch), it is largely because they have been conditioned to shun ‘formalism’ and to admire ‘socialist realism.’”

In the first place it is not a question of a choice between merely the old and merely the new, as London seems to think — but of a choice between the bad, up-to-date old and the genuinely new. The alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo, but kitsch. In the second place, neither in backward Russia nor in the advanced West do the masses prefer kitsch simply because their governments condition them toward it. Where state educational systems take the trouble to mention art, we are told to respect the old masters, not kitsch; and yet we go and hang Maxfield Parrish or his equivalent on our walls, instead of Rembrandt and Michelangelo. Moreover, as Macdonald himself points out, around 1925 when the Soviet regime was encouraging avant-garde cinema, the Russian masses continued to prefer Hollywood movies. No, “conditioning” does not explain the potency of kitsch.

All values are human values, relative values, in art as well as elsewhere. Yet there does seem to have been more or less of a general agreement among the cultivated of mankind over the ages as to what is good art and what bad. Taste has varied, but not beyond certain limits; contemporary connoisseurs agree with the eighteenth-century Japanese that Hokusai was one of the greatest artists of his time; we even agree with the ancient Egyptians that Third and Fourth Dynasty art was the most worthy of being selected as their paragon by those who came after. We may have come to prefer Giotto to Raphael, but we still do not deny that Raphael was one of the best painters of his time. There has been an agreement then, and this agreement rests, I believe, on a fairly constant distinction made between those values only to be found in art and the values which can be found elsewhere. Kitsch, by virtue of a rationalized technique that draws on science and industry, has erased this distinction in practice.

Let us see, for example, what happens when an ignorant Russian peasant such as Macdonald mentions stands with hypothetical freedom of choice before two paintings, one by Picasso, the other by Repin. In the first he sees, let us say, a play of lines, colors and spaces that represent a woman. The abstract technique — to accept Macdonald’s supposition, which I am inclined to doubt — reminds him somewhat of the icons he has left behind him in the village, and he feels the attraction of the familiar. We will even suppose that he faintly surmises some of the great art values the cultivated find in Picasso. He turns next to Repin’s picture and sees a battle scene. The technique is not so familiar — as technique. But that weighs very little with the peasant, for he suddenly discovers values in Repin’s picture that seem far superior to the values he has been accustomed to find in icon art; and the unfamiliar itself is one of the sources of those values: the values of the vividly recognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic. In Repin’s picture the peasant recognizes and sees things in the way in which he recognizes and sees things outside of pictures — there is no discontinuity between art and life, no need to accept a convention and say to oneself, that icon represents Jesus because it intends to represent Jesus, even if it does not remind me very much of a man. That Repin can paint so realistically that identifications are self-evident immediately and without any effort on the part of the spectator — that is miraculous. The peasant is also pleased by the wealth of self-evident meanings which he finds in the picture: “it tells a story. ” Picasso and the icons are so austere and barren in comparison. What is more, Repin heightens reality and makes it dramatic: sunset, exploding shells, running and falling men. There is no longer any question of Picasso or icons. Repin is what the peasant wants, and nothing else but Repin. It is lucky, however, for Repin that the peasant is protected from the products of American capitalism, for he would not stand a chance next to a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell.

Ultimately, it can be said that the cultivated spectator derives the same values from Picasso that the peasant gets from Repin, since what the latter enjoys in Repin is somehow art too, on however low a scale, and he is sent to look at pictures by the same instincts that send the cultivated spectator. But the ultimate values which the cultivated spectator derives from Picasso are derived at a second remove, as the result of reflection upon the immediate impression left by the plastic values. It is only then that the recognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic enter. They are not immediately or externally present in Picasso’s painting, but must be projected into it by the spectator sensitive enough to react sufficiently to plastic qualities. They belong to the “reflected” effect. In Repin, on the other hand, the “reflected” effect has already been included in the picture, ready for the spectator’s unreflective enjoyment.(4) Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a shore cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.

The same point can be made with respect to kitsch literature: it provides vicarious experience for the insensitive with far greater immediacy than serious fiction can hope to do. And Eddie Guest and the Indian Love Lyrics are more poetic than T. S. Eliot and Shakespeare.

III

If the avant-garde imitates the processes of art, kitsch, we now see, imitates its effects. The neatness of this antithesis is more than contrived; it corresponds to and defines the tremendous interval that separates from each other two such simultaneous cultural phenomena as the avant-garde and kitsch. This interval, too great to be closed by all the infinite gradations of popularized “modernism” and “modernistic” kitsch, corresponds in turn to a social interval, a social interval that has always existed in formal culture, as elsewhere in civilized society, and whose two termini converge and diverge in fixed relation to the increasing or decreasing stability of the given society. There has always been on one side the minority of the powerful — and therefore the cultivated — and on the other the great mass of the exploited and poor — and therefore the ignorant. Formal culture has always belonged to the first, while the last have had to content themselves with folk or rudimentary culture, or kitsch.

In a stable society that functions well enough to hold in solution the contradictions between its classes, the cultural dichotomy becomes somewhat blurred. The axioms of the few are shared by the many; the latter believe superstitiously what the former believe soberly. And at such moments in history the masses are able to feel wonder and admiration for the culture, on no matter how high a plane, of its masters. This applies at least to plastic culture, which is accessible to all.

In the Middle Ages the plastic artist paid lip service at least to the lowest common denominators of experience. This even remained true to some extent until the seventeenth century. There was available for imitation a universally valid conceptual reality, whose order the artist could not tamper with. The subject matter of art was prescribed by those who commissioned works of art, which were not created, as in bourgeois society, on speculation. Precisely because his content was determined in advance, the artist was free to concentrate on his medium. He needed not to be philosopher, or visionary, but simply artificer. As long as there was general agreement as to what were the worthiest subjects for art, the artist was relieved of the necessity to be original and inventive in his “matter” and could devote all his energy to formal problems. For him the medium became, privately, professionally, the content of his art, even as his medium is today the public content of the abstract painter’s art — with that difference, however, that the medieval artist had to suppress his professional preoccupation in public — had always to suppress and subordinate the personal and professional in the finished, official work of art. If, as an ordinary member of the Christian community, he felt some personal emotion about his subject matter, this only contributed to the enrichment of the work’s public meaning. Only with the Renaissance do the inflections of the personal become legitimate, still to be kept, however, within the limits of the simply and universally recognizable. And only with Rembrandt do “lonely” artists begin to appear, lonely in their art.

But even during the Renaissance, and as long as Western art was endeavoring to perfect its technique, victories in this realm could only be signalized by success in realistic imitation, since there was no other objective criterion at hand. Thus the masses could still find in the art of their masters objects of admiration and wonder. Even the bird that pecked at the fruit in Zeuxis’ picture could applaud.

It is a platitude that art becomes caviar to the general when the reality it imitates no longer corresponds even roughly to the reality recognized by the general. Even then, however, the resentment the common man may feel is silenced by the awe in which he stands of the patrons of this art. Only when he becomes dissatisfied with the social order they administer does he begin to criticize their culture. Then the plebian finds courage for the first time to voice his opinions openly. Every man, from the Tammany alderman to the Austrian house-painter, finds that he is entitled to his opinion. Most often this resentment toward culture is to be found where the dissatisfaction with society is a reactionary dissatisfaction which expresses itself in revivalism and puritanism, and latest of all, in fascism. Here revolvers and torches begin to be mentioned in the same breath as culture. In the name of godliness or the blood’s health, in the name of simple ways and solid virtues, the statue-smashing commences.

IV

Returning to our Russian peasant for the moment, let us suppose that after he has chosen Repin in preference to Picasso, the state’s educational apparatus comes along and tells him that he is wrong, that he should have chosen Picasso — and shows him why. It is quite possible for the Soviet state to do this. But things being as they are in Russia — and everywhere else — the peasant soon finds the necessity of working hard all day for his living and the rude, uncomfortable circumstances in which he lives do not allow him enough leisure, energy and comfort to train for the enjoyment of Picasso. This needs, after all, a considerable amount of “conditioning.” Superior culture is one of the most artificial of all human creations, and the peasant finds no “natural” urgency within himself that will drive him toward Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he feels like looking at pictures, for he can enjoy kitsch without effort. The state is helpless in this matter and remains so as long as the problems of production have not been solved in a socialist sense. The same holds true, of course, for capitalist countries and makes all talk of art for the masses there nothing but demagogy.(5)

Where today a political regime establishes an official cultural policy, it is for the sake of demagogy. If kitsch is the official tendency of culture in Germany, Italy and Russia, it is not because their respective governments are controlled by philistines, but because kitsch is the culture of the masses in these countries, as it is everywhere else. The encouragement of kitsch is merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects. Since these regimes cannot raise the cultural level of the masses — even if they wanted to — by anything short of a surrender to international socialism, they will flatter the masses by bringing all culture down to their level. It is for this reason that the avant-garde is outlawed, and not so much because a superior culture is inherently a more critical culture. (Whether or not the avant-garde could possibly flourish under a totalitarian regime is not pertinent to the question at this point.) As a matter of fact, the main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too “innocent,” that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda into them, that kitsch is more pliable to this end. Kitsch keeps a dictator in closer contact with the “soul” of the people. Should the official culture be one superior to the general mass-level, there would be a danger of isolation.

Nevertheless, if the masses were conceivably to ask for avant-garde art and literature, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin would not hesitate long in attempting to satisfy such a demand. Hitler is a bitter enemy of the avant-garde, both on doctrinal and personal grounds, yet this did not prevent Goebbels in 1932-1933 from strenuously courting avant-garde artists and writers. When Gottfried Benn, an Expressionist poet, came over to the Nazis he was welcomed with a great fanfare, although at that very moment Hitler was denouncing Expressionism as Kulturbolschewismus. This was at a time when the Nazis felt that the prestige which the avant-garde enjoyed among the cultivated German public could be of advantage to them, and practical considerations of this nature, the Nazis being skillful politicians, have always taken precedence over Hitler’s personal inclinations. Later the Nazis realized that it was more practical to accede to the wishes of the masses in matters of culture than to those of their paymasters; the latter, when it came to a question of preserving power, were as willing to sacrifice their culture as they were their moral principles; while the former, precisely because power was being withheld from them, had to be cozened in every other way possible. It was necessary to promote on a much more grandiose style than in the democracies the illusion that the masses actually rule. The literature and art they enjoy and understand were to be proclaimed the only true art and literature and any other kind was to be suppressed. Under these circumstances people like Gottfried Benn, no matter how ardently they support Hitler, become a liability; and we hear no more of them in Nazi Germany.

We can see then that although from one point of view the personal philistinism of Hitler and Stalin is not accidental to the roles they play, from another point of view it is only an incidentally contributory factor in determining the cultural policies of their respective regimes. Their personal philistinism simply adds brutality and double-darkness to policies they would be forced to support anyhow by the pressure of all their other policies — even were they, personally, devotees of avant-garde culture. What the acceptance of the isolation of the Russian Revolution forces Stalin to do, Hitler is compelled to do by his acceptance of the contradictions of capitalism and his efforts to freeze them. As for Mussolini — his case is a perfect example of the disponsibilité of a realist in these matters. For years he bent a benevolent eye on the Futurists and built modernistic railroad stations and government-owned apartment houses. One can still see in the suburbs of Rome more modernistic apartments than almost anywhere else in the world. Perhaps Fascism wanted to show its up-to-dateness, to conceal the fact that it was a retrogression; perhaps it wanted to conform to the tastes of the wealthy elite it served. At any rate Mussolini seems to have realized lately that it would be more useful to him to please the cultural tastes of the Italian masses than those of their masters. The masses must be provided with objects of admiration and wonder; the latter can dispense with them. And so we find Mussolini announcing a “new Imperial style.” Marinetti, Chirico, et al., are sent into the outer darkness, and the new railroad station in Rome will not be modernistic. That Mussolini was late in coming to this only illustrates again the relative hesitance with which Italian Fascism has drawn the necessary implications of its role.

Capitalism in decline finds that whatever of quality it is still capable of producing becomes almost invariably a threat to its own existence. Advances in culture, no less than advances in science and industry, corrode the very society under whose aegis they are made possible. Here, as in every other question today, it becomes necessary to quote Marx word for word. Today we no longer look toward socialism for a new culture — as inevitably as one will appear, once we do have socialism. Today we look to socialism simply for the preservation of whatever living culture we have right now.

Source of Copy and Paste.

Top Row:
> Kartell Tati Table Lamp. Retails for $798. Found it on Amazon.com for cheaper, $765 (that includes shipping and no tax).
> Flos Gun Lamp designed by Philippe Starck. $948 at unicahome (free shipping and no tax).
> Marilyn Monroe 1 Print by Andy Warhol. Retails for $750 at Opus Art. Use ANDYW2 coupon code for 25% off.

Middle Row:
> Herman Miller Eames Lounge Chair (LCW) in Ebony. Retails for $818. Amazon has it for $551 (free shipping and no tax).
> All Cone Bracelet by Eddie Borgo. Retails on the official site for $450.
> Bodum Chambord Coffee Press – 32oz. Amazon sells it for the cheapest, for $35.89 (free shipping and no tax).
> Converse Chuck Taylor by Cody Hudson. Aloha Rag is selling these shoes for $75.

Bottom Row:
> Alexander McQueen Skull Black Cushion by The Rug Company. Sells direct for $675.
> Martin Margiela Leather Traveling Bag. On sale at Aloha Rag for $995.
> The Selby Is In Your Place by Todd Selby. Amazon has it for $23.10

the piece is titled, Symbol of Wealth

Bonus. Checked out her workspace. Like Studio 54, but way cooler.

I was immediately drawn to the piece on the right, and guess what? She said I can have it. SCORE!!!!

my favorite part was discovering that a spider had a Han Solo stuck in carbonite moment.

cool floor, huh?

Cheers!

Executed in 1985, it’s a good size at 78.25 x 58.25 inches.

Copy + Paste from Sotheby’s:

In the catalogue to the spectacular retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1985, the museum’s renowned director Alan Bowness described the art of Francis Bacon thus: “His own work sets the standard for our time, for he is surely the greatest living painter; no artist in our century has presented the human predicament with such insight and feeling….for Bacon, the virtues of truth and honesty transcend the tasteful. They give to his paintings a terrible beauty that has placed them among the most memorable images in the entire history of art” (Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1985, p. 7). Executed in this very year, Figure in Movement represents physical testament to this acclamation. Exhibiting the most striking composition, a magnificent array of brushwork
and a supremely arresting palette, this is a formidable portrayal of the human animal that epitomises the full gamut of Bacon’s artistic genius. Indeed, the inimitable traits of his method, specifically the intense combination of brilliant cadmium orange with depthless black, directly compare with the masterpieces Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 (Tate Britain, London) and Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York).

Gifted by the artist to his physician Dr. Paul Brass, who followed his father Dr. Stanley Brass as Bacon’s personal doctor and with whom Bacon maintained a close bond until his death in 1992, Figure in Movement possesses an exceptional provenance. The terms of its ownership vividly reflect its importance to Bacon: not only was Dr. Brass a most trusted friend, but when he was first offered a choice of painting and initially suggested another work, the artist instead recommended Figure in Movement, assuring his doctor that it was a superior painting. Eminently regarded through its distinguished exhibition history in major shows in Moscow, Paris, London and The Hague, as well as its long-term loan to the Tate; this marks the historic occasion of its first appearance to market.

Foremost among Bacon’s innermost clique in 1985 was John Edwards, a handsome East-Ender and the artist’s closest companion at this time. Edwards wrote, “it was a perfect relationship. I was never Francis’ lover, but I loved him as the best friend a man could have. He was fond of me like a son” (Exh. Cat., New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1998, p. 7) and Dr. Brass has also stated: “I never heard Francis say a bad word about John. He said to me…’I think of John like a son. He’s a son to me really’” (interviewed for Bacon’s Arena, directed by Adam Low, produced by Anthony Wall, BBC Arena and The Estate of Francis Bacon, 2005). The parity between Edwards and the present physiognomy is clear: the long jaw-line, the geometries of the eye, nose and mouth and the jet-black hairline. However, Bacon never painted his friend from life and the naked torso of this body is adapted from photos of other models, notably the infamous shots of George Dyer in his underwear taken 20 years earlier. Thus, Figure in Movement conflates two of the most important figures in the artist’s life. Significantly, Bacon inserts this being, an amalgamation of that which he held most dear, onto an exposed dais that is a crucible of existential isolation: the natural environment of his extraordinary artistic and philosophical innovation.

While the figure twists and writhes as if to struggle free of the canvas, it is contained within indications of rigid cricket pads. The sport was a subject of fascination for the artist’s later career. A photograph of source material littering his studio floor reveals the intriguing arrangement of a copy of Physique Pictorial lying on top of England cricketer David Gower’s book With Time to Spare, so that the legs of a brooding male bodybuilder join up with the cricket pads of a batsman underneath. This fusion of diametrically opposed images is archetypal of Bacon’s ability to meld starkly eclectic themes to portray the chaos of human existence, and provides apt parallel with Figure
in Movement. Bacon draws on his knowledge of art historical precedent, such as the incomparable figural studies of Michelangelo. He accelerates the effects of light and shadow, plunging form in and out of darkness so that several passages of light flow in simultaneous chorus. Chiaroscuro rhythms of anatomic gesture negotiate between
material and void, while the figure’s left leg dissolves in the black ether of the platform.

More than any other artist of the 20th Century, Bacon held a mirror to the nature of the Human Condition, and Figure in Movement provides the perfect reflection of what he saw. He was fascinated by the postwar works of the French existentialists Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir, and their themes of alienation, imprisonment and the absurd. The most important actors of Bacon’s canon, typified by this figure, crystallise this entire philosophical enquiry, as they let go of the sureties of the past and stand on the threshold of an unknowable future.

It was fun.

Lots of people dressed up for Halloween. I wasn’t one of them.

Unfortunately, because a lot of the pieces were on loan, we were not allowed to take pictures of the items in the exhibit. At least I got to take a photo of this amazing Rothko, which is from the permanent collection.

Another cool thing is that I got to see the MOCA Director, Jeffrey Deitch in the flesh at the Geffen Contemporary branch.

Copy+Paste from MOCA:

The Artist’s Museum showcases works by 146 artists who have helped shape the artistic dialogue in Los Angeles since the founding of MOCA over 30 years ago. Based on MOCA’s world-renowned permanent collection, supplemented by key loans from local collectors and artists, this special presentation features over 250 works, including a number of new projects made especially for this occasion. Representing the diversity and uniqueness of the Los Angeles community, the exhibition highlights important works from legendary L.A. artists who remain vital and influential alongside those emerging from renowned local art schools, visionary artists associated with various street cultures and subcultures, and crossover artists connected to performance, music, and film.

Link: MOCA

Some close-ups.

Feedback Loop 2. I love how he is able to blend the colors.

Spaceboy. one of my favorites.

Embedded – the show’s namesake.

yea, they’re pretty big.

From Ace Gallery’s Press Release:

Justin Bower’s portraits combine succulent impasto brushwork with a Neo-Baroque sensibility folded into the aesthetic of the pixilated computer screen. Exuding jarring anxious energy, his vivid, large-scale, oil on canvas paintings are full frontal close-up, anonymized faces, based on one hijacked image from a social networking website such as Facebook or MySpace. Interested in the instability and turbulent nature of subjectivity today, particularly mediated through computer screens, he paints oil on canvas permutations of one specific photographic image, affected and infected with the tropes of our contemporary reproduction technologies. His paintings reflect subjectivity today: mediated, indefinite, and in a perpetual state of boundless flux and transformation.

Through the use of a hyper-saturated color palette Bower weaves synthetic colors into the organic body, retaining a naturalness of flesh while suggesting an artificial origin, fusing the object and subject, wary that our own images have become objects of manipulation. He conflates the function of skin and flesh as a boundary between biological interiority and externalized technologies. In these paintings, there is a consistent breaching between the borders of physicality in the figurative, and abstraction: conscious of Francis Bacon’s legacy and of Jenny Saville’s voluptuous flesh, with oil paint, a substitute for the sensual human form. Bower’s intent is to show that subjectivity today plays with the boundaries that separate the organic/synthetic, human/non-human, interiority/exteriority, self/other and finally between abstraction and the figurative. One of the artist’s aims is to create the ecstasy coupled with the dread/terror that accompanied the historical sublime’s overwhelming landscape, inverting this paradox to the overwhelming ‘internal body-scape.’

Choosing an anonymous as well as androgynous face found on the internet, Bower reinterprets the image in each of his paintings, distorting any individual identity; the multiplicity and endless variation of the distorted facial image confuses an authentic origin, reaffirming the tension between the digital image and actual subject (real world counterpoint). But at the same time, his ‘intervention’ frees the connection and enables the artist to see the image as a free-floating signifier. Bower focuses upon two distinct areas of subject formation and de-formation. The first is a specific digital reference, the code through which these subjects emerge, are infected by, disintegrate and finally rest in their identity flux. Through the paintings, The Instability of Infinite Origin (2010), Spaceboy (2010) and Holographic Interjections (2010), the artist considers the inevitable reductionist instinct that occurs when any code, be it digital, genomic, anthropological, is applied to the human subject. This, according to Bower, is coupled with the anxiety of the possible infinite expressions of this code. The second area flows from the first, but the subject is interpreted in terms of contextual feedback loops.

These paintings interpret the subject through invasive linear abstractions into the face, particularly the sensory organs, i.e. exaggerated mouth and teeth. These feedback loops intimated in his accretion and build-up of paint marks (upon a structured armature) treat the subject as a weak operator formed and deformed by the institutional systems of knowledge folding back into the subject, echoing cybernetics’ theory of feedback loop consciousness. In Spaceboy, Bower was conscious of the paintings of Caravaggio, re-conceived and filtered through the digital glowing interface of computer screens. Through the medium of painting, he links the image to some alternate future, conveying a desire to understand the cultural and biological changes in subjectivity and identity.

Holographic Introjection is another exercise in the digital Baroque and its hallucinatory glowing color where the artist sought to give a sense of mitosis (cellular division). In Architecture of Infection, the paint leaks: disturbing, covering, and revealing. It is within the sensory organs (eyes, mouth, nose) that the distortion is most exaggerated, violating the humanist locus of a singular sensory operator. Grids snap into power and digital pixels erode the flesh forcing the subject into a state of flux, as it prepares to dissolve or become whole in some new form. In The Geometry in Violence, Bower wanted to convey the dangers and potential violation to the individual, subjected to standardized, monotonous, institutionalized systems and rules.

All of these paintings are contradictory, unstable, and in an un-fixed position (optically and conceptually) creating tension between rupture and rigidity in the construction of the painting. Bower uses the doubling of certain features on the face to optically play with this instability. Addressing androgyny, Bower postulates that figuratively, body boundaries are fluid (if not “leaking”), putting into question the stability of subjectivity, gender and sexuality. The regenerative traits and human codings of biotechnologies, paranoia about DNA and genetic engineering, are suggested in his paintings through the grafting of superfluous body parts. An image without an original seen through a pixilated interface situates the subject’s context into an endless mise en abyme. The anxiety in the perceived ‘loss’ of self, generated by critical theorists, the reduction of all matter to ‘code’, and the tendencies of the biotech world to hyperbolize the redemption of the future is exemplified in the status of his subjects to function as existing as in-between states.

Link: Ace Gallery

vintage F*** Me Boots.

C’est tout.

Link:
After Modern Art 1945-2000

Here’s a close up of one of my favorites from the show. Unfortunately, my camera was not able to pick up the vibrant blue that seemed to float on the reddish panel. You have to see it in person to really appreciate it.

Link: Da Aie Park

Link: Review of the film from Los Angeles Times

Joshua Nathansan – Over Here, Check Out His Shoes, 2010. Acrylic on wood panel, 26 x 30 inches.

Jesse Mockrin - No Ordinary Sleep (rapids), 2010. Oil and photograph on canvas, 26 x 36 inches.

cool kids congregate.

Link: Steve Turner Contemporary

In it, the bad guys are lured into this maze, where they are methodically massacred by the underdogs. Amazing cinematography.

Trailer.

Link: Red Cliff

If you do the google search, you’ll find that there’s a bit of controversy in regards to the artist, this painting, and how LACMA aquired it. Quite fascinating.

Links:
LACMA
Thomas Eakins

close-up…

It was interesting to read that back in the day the protocol (thumbs up) was to kill the defeated gladiator. So, “thumbs down” actually indicated the crowd’s desire to spare the guy. Somewhere along the way, the interpretation got messed up.

Links:
Jean-Léon Gérôme
The Iris, Getty Blog

I create modern-organic, sculptural designs, interweaving function and fine art. Combing equal parts western and eastern sensibilities with delicacy and meticulous technique.

A similar table can be bought here.

Link: Michael Wilson Designs

the hamburglar honored us with his presence…

while waiting for the movie to start, noticed EM’s toe nails.. cool color.

Link: CGV Cinemas

Sunday night, checked out the IMAX version of Inception at Rave Motion Pictures 18. We had the best seats (back row).

Here’s a nifty graphic that someone else made.

Iván Navarro’s Swatch Art Special offers an intriguing look into the mind of the artist. In his work Navarro uses mirrors and light as a medium of thoughtful reflection, and in this work for Swatch he presents a contemporary variation. The smooth, matt black leather strap and loop and solid black plastic case are presented in stark contrast with the polished stainless steel 316L buckle and the mirrored surface of the dial. Navarro uses the inside surface of the watch glass to present a silver and black skull, beneath which thin wire crossbones with black arrows glide over the mirrored surface, marking time. You Stop You Die (GZ225) comes in a special sleeve.

Specs:

Interacting with the exhibit? Sooj trying to watch the movie and some guy was doing some sort of performance art thing next to her.

We all appreciate weird shit, but this was disturbing to the nth degree. Couldn’t take it. I hope I don’t get nightmares.

A few of the videos they showed:

K-CoreaINC.K (section a) from Ryan Trecartin on Vimeo.

Sibling Topics (section a) from Ryan Trecartin on Vimeo.

P.opular S.ky (section ish) from Ryan Trecartin on Vimeo.

MOCA members were given easy entrance, but still had to wait in line to see the exhibition. Killing time in line.

View from the line….

See? Crowded.

Art Highlights… Dennis Hopper had an eclectic body of work…

this is what my friends and I usually do when we come to these things… become each other’s paparazzi.

….and that was the show.

After-show shenanigans.

Late dinner at Koraku..

Cheers!

Close up of one of Vhils’ pieces.

Connor Harrington has a way with the spray can.

Antony Micallef’s work, however morbid and dark, is amazing to look at.

and of course, there’s JR, who I’ve featured on my blog many times before..

Really have had to be in the space to appreciate the artistry..

Cheers!

Copy + Paste from Lazarides

Immortalizing the individual in monumental proportions is what these exciting artists do best. Using the overlooked, misunderstood and mundane elements of our everyday, each artist captures our attention with their distinctive style and alternative approach. Sharing a vested interest in their individual and collective surroundings and society, they poetically express a desire for universal appreciation.

Sheila in deep contemplation. 

Baldessari’s Tips For Artists Who Want To Sell

My Tribute to Baldessari.

The dots served two functions in Baldessari’s work; they allowed him to “obliterate” the identifies of people in his found images and also to render them anonymous so they could be seen more as generic types (such as an art curator or an art hustler) rather than specific individuals. But the dots also represented Baldessari’s overall strategy aimed at deflecting the viewer’s gaze from the habitual way of seeing – prompting viewers to look

Sooj and Madame.

Links:
LACMA
John Baldessari

Here are a few photos that I took. Sooj chowing down on tacos.

Projection on the ceiling. They’re clay figures. The one lying down was being sewed up after a C-section.

photo of some part of some film.

Yep, the event itself was a bit over my head…. We didn’t stay too long. Still fun though.

Not much to say, but if you can appreciate the use of colors…very, very awesome. Even if just for a moment, these paintings effectively transport you to the sea, as captured in the books and fairy tales of our youth.

Link: Ace Gallery

On the invitation, I was most curious by what the gallery called “Performance Action.” Apparently, this was it. A couple of people in scary-looking costumes walking around and mingling with the crowd.

This was the signature piece of the show.

With many items on display, there was a lot to take in. The following are some of the pieces that had me standing and staring for a few… 

In many of his works, you see Freyer use box shapes and a series of rings to create a moving image… looks like a bunch of books spiraling down an infinite vortex.  

This one is pretty fascinating… stare at it long enough and it appears to be a stage design..

This photo does not do this room justice. In any case, it was one of my favorites and illustrates the artsit’s abilities to use physical cues (carefully placed white barrier around the shin-area) and optical illusions (mirror on the floor) to convey a sense of infinity, or a descent down to a dark hell.

As others have noted, the costumes from the latest iteration (and most controversial) of the Ring Opera were actually a bit more interesting than the actual paint on canvas, if only because you could see them up close. Light sabers, wooo!

Another costumed performer.

That’s it.

Engaging art, beautiful people, and free booze. This is how art openings should be.

Links:
Ace Gallery

Links:
Watership Down
Monkey Business
Christie’s

Here are some of the pieces that caught my eye:

Dane Goodman’s Untitled (Black Mesa Series) was featured on the show’s post card.

Robert Murray makes these incredible frames with a bajillion screws.

Rose Kelly’s Peacefulness in a Cup of Tea, which was created following an inspirational trip to Bhutan. 

My favorite was Eugenie Spirito’s Kissing Fish.

Link:
PYO Gallery LA
Estrada Fine Arts

Christie’s is auctioning it off on behalf of the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation. Lot 8, Sale 7857.

I quite like it.

Link:
Jose Parla
Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery

Dalí Atomicus, shows the madcap Dalí aloft, brush and palette in hand. He is flanked by a chair and two easels (holding Dalí canvases) — all elevated, and seemingly floating, above the floor, which heightens the sense of suspension. But the main event is the great curve of water arcing across the image, along with three flying (or flung) cats in damp, disconcerted disarray. For once Dalí’s characteristic look of exaggerated surprise makes sense.

Link: Joys of Jumpology by Roberta Smith, New York Times, 5/23/10.

Contemporary artist and graffiti legend Steve Powers talks about his creative journey and the process and thinking behind Love Letter – arguably the longest love story ever written: a 20 block long grafitti ballad painted across West Philadelphia’s rooftops and walls.

Here, I attempt to tell the story, quick and dirty, at the same time, highlighting the main characters in their new LA Opera costumes.

The End.

Link: LA Opera

Choe is one of my favorite artists. I don’t know him personally, but I get that he’s a pretty straight up, no bullshit kind of guy, living life on his terms.

Here are some of the highlights of the show…

I will take all my love all my hate all my pain all my rage, all my suffering and all my skills and experience I’ve collected over the years everything I’ve learned in every medium from watercolors to oils to spray paint I’m gonna express everything I feel about this city and what it is to live and die and be born again in the city of angels….
                                                                                               – David Choe, 2010

320 N. Beverly Dr., Beverly Hills, CA 90210

Links:
David Choe
Lazarides Gallery

Originally painted in 1778 by John Singleton Copley. This painting depicts people coming to the rescue of a young Brook Watson. He was saved, but at the cost of his right leg (if you look closely, you can see blood). Even back then, there were lots of sharks around Cuba.

A couple of fun interpretations by Josh (SHAG) Agle.

Links:
LACMA
Josh (SHAG) Agle

From Sotheby’s:

Gautier modelled this extraordinary figure of Mephistopheles in the early 1850′s and sent it for display at the Exposition Universelle of 1855. Its idiosyncratic design proved a success and soon after the firm of Duplan et Salles began to cast the model in bronze. Busquet, a critic for the journal L’Artiste was moved to write ‘They have edited this strange Mephistopheles with a long and grimacing profile which one can see, not without some surprise, in the showrooms of the principal stores in Paris’. One customer was the Duchess of Alba, who acquired a cast for the cabinet of Napoleon III.

Here’s a time-lapsed video of Mark Ryden painting the above work, Incarnation. Spectacular.

Links:
Paul Kasmin Gallery
Mark Ryden

I’m thinking about going back and buying nine more, painting them all matte black, and then, stacking them in one of the corners of my play room….evoking the eeriness of the Catacombs of Paris…or not.