-
Don’t Let ‘Em See You Sweat: Notes on Work
In the mind’s eye hangs a poster of a discomfitingly adorable orange-and-white kitten clinging perilously to a tree branch by a single paw. In thick bubbly script are the words “Hang in there, baby!” I don’t know much about what my friends have accomplished this year, but we are all exceedingly familiar with what we’re more »
-
By the Book
LAST THURSDAY NIGHT’S launch of the debut LA Art Book Fair at the Geffen Contemporary at MoCA took not just the building but also social-media sites and apps by storm, an earnest frenzy that had settled into a simple fact of life by the time I arrived on the scene Friday. Organized by Printed Matter as more »
-
Rei Kawakubo
My fashion pedigree is wholly derived from childhood predilection for wrapping swaths of cloth and ribbon left over from my mother’s sewing projects around my body in primitive, avant-gardist arrangements. I would punctuate the look with bright pink plastic heels, the kind that came in a blisterpack from the supermarket, and then hobble over to more »
-
Overlapping Histories: Curatorial Practices in San Francisco
Yes, thanks to the Philistines of Cyberspace the word CURATOR is being stretched to the very limits of semantic significance, but rather than join the chorus of affronted cultural elites pointing fingers at every blogger or boutique-owner who dares to don that hallowed mantle, I thought it might be more productive to speak with two more »
-
“Feast of Burden” on MOCAtv
I first encountered artist Eugene Kotlyarenko about four years ago at a film shoot in Los Angeles. We were both playing extras in a music video for The Like, and our job was to dress like cute 60s kids and dance around the bar while the band played. There were dozens of us, but more »
-
The Optometrist and the Wallpaper Designer
I like that Fraenkel Gallery doesn’t present the pairing of the two artists featured in their latest exhibition with an overwrought thesis. Burchfield / Meatyard is its own kind of poetry. The painter and the photographer do have a “shared sensibility” of nature that’s maybe summed up by a shared preference for peace and quiet, more »
-
Let Them Eat Pop
I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and that was it. —Andy Warhol on why he chose to paint soup cans If these musings prove nothing more than the paranoid ramblings of someone who finds poetry in grocery lists and weeps at the sight of octogenarians more »
-
McGee and Me
The end of summer is a strange moment. The energy of back-to-school jitters permeates everything. Fashion releases its flimsiest glossies in preparation for the cinder-block September issues. Galleries shutter, giving their artists and proprietors a chance to check in with the Midwest and assure their families that they’re getting enough to eat and thus return more »
-
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Magazines
I think I hate book culture. I was having coffee with a friend the other day, like you do, when our talk turned to magazines; what we’re reading, which ones we’d like to read, why that one goddamn glossy from the UK costs $15, etc. At some point, I absentmindedly wiped my chocolate-scone smeared hand more »
-
Mandana Towhidy Tells Us About the Hair Metal Days of “Arcadia”
I’m not all that used to reading books that don’t open with some overwrought description of the night sky or a gloved hand reaching for a letter, and I wasn’t sure what to expect from Mandana Towhidy’s self-described “heavy metal novel” Arcadia. Turns out, high school narratives actually deal in much of the same subject more »