HOME     BLOG VIEW     ABOUT     CONTACT     SUBSCRIBE

The Quiet Artwork of an Outspoken Artist

AP

Ai Weiwei’s Sunflowers at the Mary Boone Gallery, 2012 – Last year the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei captured the world’s attention when he was detained on April 3rd, and was held in a secret police detention center for the following 80 days. It was a story that brought the real world to the doorstep of the art world, and as the art world awaited news of the already internationally known artist, protests of his disappearance took place everywhere. In New York City, home to a particularly large and vocal art community, various different protests—Creative Time’s 1001 Chairs for Ai Weiwei, a staged recreation of the artist’s own installation Fairytale: 1001 Qing Dynasty Wooden Chairs for Documenta 12, or the Cuban artist ... [Read more]

New Open Doors

Wulf

The Wulf, Deleuze and the Songbirds of Finland I am haunted by a woman facing South. I see her standing at the edge of an open field, eyes fixed on a distant road. I know very little about her. She died over a hundred years ago when her husband, August, my great-grandfather, rode off South across the Comancheria toward Mexico, his wagon loaded with the bulk of the family’s possessions. This woman was a lover of music, and I was thinking about her last week when I went to see some composers and sound artists present work at The Wulf in downtown Los Angeles. To avoid divulging more about my ancestry I could divert this post into a description of what I experienced at The Wulf, but I actually don’t want to tell you much more about ... [Read more]

A Larger Hunger

web_RED

And God Created Great Whales, Rinde Eckert, REDCAT, January 2012 – Rinde Eckert takes to the stage, house lights on, sits at a piano-cum-surrogate-captain's-table strewn with post-its and and tinkers endlessly with what appears to be sheet music. The stage lights dim to black and then rise again, and Eckert appears now as Nathan, a hapless piano tuner, who, along with his imaginary muse Olivia, trace, tack and travail the last vestiges of Nathan’s memory in order to piece together his magna opera “Moby Dick”. Strapped around his waist and hung around his neck are color-coded tape recordings. These are Nathan's memory devices; they supply him with directives on how to complete his musical masterpiece, if only he could recall long ... [Read more]

The Considered Eye

Trypps 4-300

An Interview with Experimental Filmmaker Ben Russell –  I first encountered Ben Russell’s films in Hollywood. He was screening some of his works at the venerable Egyptian Theater. As is often the case, with the long established Los Angeles Filmforum venue, you walk in without expectation and walk out energized, rearranged and reaffirmed. The films screened that evening were exceptional and the ideas and images had remained on my mind for several years. It was this longevity of memory that prompted me to talk with Ben about his work as an artist. His films push forward place and person with a fresh intelligent force. There is a quiet and ultra wide observation at work. Character, landscape, and action are given equal ... [Read more]

Chauvet and Lascaux, The Deeper Syntax

Rhino_Chauvet

Reflections on the Phenomenology of Upper Paleolithic Cave Art – One of the most important questions we can ask is how we came to recognize ourselves. This is not the same as asking when we first saw our image reflected in still water, or how we learned to react selfishly to pain and fear. It is not merely self-awareness we are after, but the awareness of oneself as oneself—the awareness of ‘I’ apart from the material continuum of the natural world, and without any other quality attached to it. So many uniquely human technological achievements—the fishhook, fire, cutting edges, even basic seafaring—the results of millennia of trials and errors—seem possible without recourse to ‘I’. But identity, philosophy, poetry, ... [Read more]

Mike Kelley, In Memoriam

Obit_Kelley_0b174

I’ll always think of Mike as a beautifully raging genius who was a protean artist, great dancer, and highly skilled in dismantling all manner of bullshit. With fondness always. —Rita Valencia PRESS RELEASE Subject: Mike Kelley, artist, passes away Date:    Weds. February 1, 2012 From:   Kelley Studio and Friends Contact: Studio: 323 257 7853 John C. Welchman:  323 258 8957 ********************************* Our dear friend the artist Mike Kelley (born 1954 in Detroit) has passed away. Unstintingly passionate, habitually outspoken and immeasurably creative in every genre or material with which he took up—and that was most of them, from performance and sculpture to painting, installation and video, from ... [Read more]