The scope of photography that has crossed my desk just so far this year started in earnest with progressive documentarian and social theorist Allan Sekula at Christopher Grimes Gallery, and from there branched out to post-modern romantic portraiture by Tasya van Ree, and Tranimal-inspired Pin-Ups by Austin Young. I covered iconic candid shots of rock stars by Henry Diltz, and sensational vernacular photography by the once-unknown Vivian Maier at Merry Karnowsky Gallery. The same week that I was a docent at photo LA, I covered old-school artist Bruce of Los Angeles’ fancy physique shots at Stephen Cohen, and reviewed the absurdly gorgeous book of the international artwork of ABOVE from Zero+ Publishing. Soon thereafter, the compelling group show of contemporary landscape photography Manifest Destiny at Analog Salon, and the unique, years-long portrait project by Sam Comen, 30 at 30. I profiled controversial, irreverent, and gifted fashion-fine art crossover phenomenon Jill Greenberg, and reviewed Kevin Cooley who was showing simultaneously at Kopeikin Gallery and Young Projects Gallery. I covered Backyard Oasis at the Palm Springs Museum — a mammoth and fantastic survey of the swimming pool in photography –for my previous post at this page. From that delirious and dazzling trip through the past to another, the show of new prints of previously unknown images of LA from 1949 by Ansel Adams warranted two pieces — a preview and a proper review.

By this point, I’d heard that the beloved annual SNAP:FLASH All-Photography Create:Fixate was being planned to coincide with the fast-approaching MOPLA, and I thought, yeah, perfect, photography is the order of the day around here — and I wondered both why that was, and what had taken so long. Since then, I wrote up Daido Moriyama at LACMA, and I’m working on a review of Fatemeh Burnes’ new heartbreaker of a book, also out from Zero+ Publishing. And it occurred to me in a snap/flash, so to speak, why it might be that photography, especially landscape photography and candid portraiture — in other words, pictures of the real, outside, everyday world — is experiencing such love at this moment. I think it’s because people are going nuts looking at tiny pictures on phones of faraway places and they want to see big, tactile prints of real places on a human scale. So with that idea bouncing around in my brain, I’m proud to be a part of two very different but equally fascinating MOPLA events in the lead-up to the big SNAP:FLASH party on April 28. Thursday, April 19th, I’m moderating a panel discussion with all the artists at the closing reception for BEYOND THE IMAGE downtown at KGB Studios. The curator Dale Youngman asked me to engage the very talented artists in the show on the topic of how technology has changed the genre. I’m feeling like a Luddite these days, so we’ll just see how that goes.

Then the next day, Friday, April 20, we open a group show of 12 photographers I curated at Analog Salon in Culver City. It’s called LOOKING GLASS. Here’s what I said it would be about: “Everyone knows a painter, for example, starts with a blank imagination” whereas photography by definition involves interacting with the external world not entirely of your making. For LOOKING GLASS I’ve assembled a dozen photographers whose work is in various ways made in a collaboration between the imagination and the world — to explore ways that the camera is an expressive, fantastical, imaginative and pliable medium as well as form of document that contains evidence of external reality.” Again, I seem to be returning to this theme of tactility and reality when it comes to photography –

a medium whose technological range allows for the most advanced kind of illusion-making. I also got a new iPhone, and now there are literally about 7000 pictures in my camera, so there’s this other aspect of the need to document what we experience in extreme detail, externalizing our memories to our devices and our clouds and perhaps more tellingly, having learned how to have direct experiences that are inevitably viewed as potential subject matter for a snapshot. We frame everything we see through the lens (pardon the pun) of photography. Encountering such a volume of classic examples in such a short period of time, and having that juxtapozed with a celebration of the new moment in photography has given me a rejuvenated appreciation and love for the artform, and a refreshed pair of eyes with which to navigate MOPLA.k canvas and piles of pigment and that whether they makes landscape, portrait, or abstract images based in whole, in part, or not at all on external phenomenon, that the thing they make is wholly created from “nothing” or, put another way “

Anyone that knows me knows I need no excuse to hightail it for the high desert, and the meta moment from the I-love-my-job department that found me considering an exhibition about the charms and symbolism and cultural ubiquity of swimming pools along the LA-Palm Springs sunny superhighway, while reclining next to my very favorite swimming pool in the world, the one at the Hacienda Hot Springs. Some of the artists in the exhibition were to be staying there as well, all of us in from LA for the occasion. Like I said, meta. Art imitating life. Crisp blue waters evoking oases. The desert oasis as a metaphor for respite from unforgiving pressures. Yes, I’ll do it, what a great idea! I love my job!

What I did not expect, but which was a terrific surprise, is that the show would more than live up to the hype, turning out to be so much more than fun-time, blue-water, bikini-clad, eye candy. The sprawling, eclectic, and ultimately quite profound exhibition provides a multiplicity of ideas to consider. No empty calories here — maybe just a guilty pleasure or two. But in fact Senior Curator Daniell Cornell has more than succeeded in branching from the thematic through-line of the swimming pool in a way that transcends the theme. By the end, viewers have considered architecture, abstraction, landscape, candid snap shot, studied portrait, lifestyles of the rich and famous from several generations of celebrities, evolving fashions, social structure, aspiration, ruination — everything you could want for a serious examination of our culture in the second half of the 20th century. No wonder it’s in the extended Pacific Standard Time family! Perfect.

Presenting opportunities for architectural aspiration and consumerist self-expression, as well as genuine pleasure, the private backyard pools, more public but still private Raquet Club and posh hotel pools, and the pretty public though ostensibly private apartment complex pools make for a pageant of sociological backdrops against which to take the measure of the world. Always at the dramatic heart of the image is the “oasis” — but this iconography contains a multitude of meanings.

A few subcategories of narrative made for what were to my mind the most emotional and insightful moments — aka the ones that made me realize I was going to have to think about this, take it all quite seriously after all, whether or not I was rocking the deck chair. David Hockney was, naturally, well-represented, but there were also artists who photographed Hockney’s pools — who photographed them because they appeared in Hockney’s paintings and drawings. For some reason, I find this idea appealing and hilarious. Maybe because it both sends up the originals with their decadence and fancy sparkles — but at the same time, it reinforces the compelling visual character that inspired Hockney to portray them in his work; and with, it turns out, extreme accuracy.

Gorgeous movie stars in bathing suits really never gets old as a subject for photography. But the frequent appearance of celebrities in the work of a number of different artists in itself diverse. The best do something more than spy, they speak to. A depiction of Jayne Mansfield being as cute as pie; a friend of Richard Gere diving into the water in a strikingly modern and near-abstract composition; and Liberace having a playful romp with a “friend” in the most amazing bathing shorts — those are my favorites of the movie stars. Oh yeah, there are also heart-breakingly adorable, naturally sexy, wet, naked pictures of Marilyn Monroe frolicking in a pool for a night swim. Those are eternal.

The classics of architectural photography, especially Modernist wizards like Julius Shulman, are well represented and as cool as they always have been. Ed Ruscha’s early mini-masterpieces “9 Swimming Pools” are blown up on the wall; but I have to say, they looked much better in the small book form in which they originally appeared. However his presence in the show was a must, as his work was at that moment signaling a generational shift to a time in art and society that courted cypher and satire, or at least irony. Other artists working around that time and into the 1970s also addressed the encroaching darkness ahead in the American economy. It was arguably most expertly documented and presaged in the work of Los Angeles photographer and photographic historian Loretta Ayeroff. Her images of abandoned pools, decaying architecture, lonely waters, bleached paint, and dry-scaping feel stolen, captured, and vernacular — like she had to trespass to get them, always on the lookout like a person with an obsession. One imagines her sneaking into the backyards of strangers or abandoned properties, camera around her neck, just in case. Her gift for stark angles, found views, telling objects, rich color, and oppressive light speak of leave-taking, furtive escapes, and the unplanned neglect of what was once a place of pleasant luxury.

This and other divergent threads of inquiry pepper the show, with a surprise around every corner. A fine selection of Bruce of LA “physique” photos (aka hot guys in tiny trunks and loose loincloths) is a popular destination, and deservedly so. The counter-culture skateboard stuff is really fresh, representing for a genre that only recently started getting the attention and respect its influence deserves — and reminding viewers that pools aren’t always pretty — and sometimes an oasis is less about water than it is about freedom.

Loretta Ayeroff,  Abandoned Pool, California Ruins, Perris Valley, 1974/printed 2011, Type R print from Kodachrome transparency, Courtesy of Loretta Ayeroff © 1974 Loretta Ayeroff

Herb Ritts, Richard Gere – Poolside, 1982, C-type print, Courtesy of the Herb Ritts Foundation, Los Angeles © Herb Ritts Foundation

Michael Childers, The Hockney Swimmer,  1978, C-type print, Courtesy of Michael Childers © Michael Childers

David Hockney, John St. Clair Swimming (from Twenty Photographic Pictures), 1972, c-type print from edition of 80, Sonnabend Collection, New York © David Hockney; photo credit Richard Schmidt

Lawrence Schiller, Marilyn Monroe, 1962/printed 2011, digital chromogenic print, Courtesy of Judith and Lawrence Schiller; Lawrence Schiller © Polaris Communications, Inc.

As an aside, not for nothing is Lopez an expert marketing, production, and enthusiasm-raiser type of guy. The door to door service included a stop at his family’s stylish and fantastic coffee shop on Porter Street, Porter Junction Cafe, where even the iced coffee is hand-crafted and there’s a breakfast sandwich named for Elvis. So we got started on the right foot. Which was good, because I would have been lost without him from the second we got on the Freeway, and I needed the caffeine. Adventures into the unknown can be exhausting!

The Story of Sur is by definition, many things to many people — and none of it is what you might think. The idea for the name came to Lopez by way of a very non-art-world shade of cultural meme; which has to do with gang culture in our state prison system. It seems that the way incarceration works at the state level, is such that members of rival gangs often end up in close quarters. But there are different levels of “rival,” which include not only your local, back-home, day-to-day enemies, but combatants in a more epic, Northern versus Southern Cali battle that crosses generational lines. The idea being, that when confronted with a larger enemy, folks form united fronts, and nominal enemies from down the block become brethren. A temporarily more inclusive group identity is forged from fractious elements, and a common history embraced, at least on the battlefield.

So with that semiotic framework in mind (though no profound consideration of gang culture ensues) Miller and Lopex set about putting together an ambitious debut with an eye toward redefining what is meant by Latino culture in the Greater LA art continuum. In other words, to move beyond familiar tropes of Chicano painting and folk-based art to take a real look at the involvement of artists with Latino heritage in modernism, performance, politically active, and non-traditional art forms. The idea to locate the show in two college campuses and one community gallery was a meaningful one to both Miller (who teaches at Rio Hondo and runs the gallery there) and Lopez, who went to art school but, “Never saw any crazy shit like this in art class.” For him, simply providing access and exposure to an accessible avant-garde is a radical educational move. That’s why the Biennial’s buzz words are: Adaptation, Assimilation, Acculturation, and its directives are: Educate, Activate, Provocate.

The first thing you might have noticed if you were lucky enough to see the show(s) with or without benefit of a concierge and driver, is that there was no painting to speak of — a mural project, a few elements of large installations, but no just-painting paintings. Sculpture, video, installation, performance, even opera, sure. In other words, everything but painting, the logic being that’s the one thing people know about Latino art already, and the point of Sur was to take the discourse to the next level, to get beyond the stereotypes and expectations, and see the Latino art “community” and something that itself transcends community, and has its practitioners in every facet of contemporary art.

Among the most impactful of the pieces in terms of making this point, my favorite was an astonishing sculpture by Gustavo Godoy at Cerritos College, in which he demonstrated every bit of whimsy, folly, and structural complexity typically found in his room-size pieces, but in his version of miniature (meaning about the size of a dune buggy). Also at Cerritos were a huge mural by Castillo which used photography and drawing in a mammoth collage that was both similar to and entirely different from her normal 3-D and often site-specific sculptures; a video piece by Elana Mann featuring the singing of a 16th-century folk song about preserving private intellectual and spiritual freedom in the face of various types of social and economic oppression and persecution. Though not a Latin song — it’s roots are in

Europe, Persia and North Africa — it speaks directly to another kind of Sur Lopez had in mind, one which reverses the flow so as to explore the mutual mingling of experiences between and among Latinos in a global historical context, not just art, and not just in California, despite its clarified expressions here.

Also brilliant were coffin-based sculptures by Martin Durazo, photographs of himself peeing on famous museums by Ichiro Irie, both at Rio Hondo. In both cases for very different reasons, humor and genuine irreverence were paired up against institutional and art historical structures to create counterpoints of aesthetic experience that between them took into account both specific and general relationships to contemporary art, having to do with gender, race, and nationality without dealing directly with any of those things. Over at the third venue, the Bluebird Arthouse, Vidal Herrera’s low-rider coffin couch with its pink leatherette and gold-plated grotto, inspired by the artist’s perception that his culture was under-appreciated by its own heirs, ended the excursion on a high note. Across the board, a dark humor prevailed despite the deadly seriousness of the artistic practices that were examined, and I was left feeling that not only my functional definition of Latino art had been forever expanded, but so had my definition of Los Angeles as a city itself.

barmecidal: adjective: Giving only an illusion of something; unreal.
nescient: adjective: Lacking knowledge or awareness.
babel: noun: 1. A confused mixture of noises or voices. 2. A scene of noise or confusion.

So a couple of months ago, I went and saw this show at Paul Young’s gallery in the PDC. It was called <<<(((Mods & Hackers)))>>> Game Modification, Hacking, Patching Avatars and Code-based Practices within Contemporary Art, and it melted my brain and I’ve been obsessing over it ever since.

I was with my friend the artist Rick Robinson, and we were making a special trip to see the QR code stuff because of some things he’d been working on with street art and video projections. Also David Stone had just done this show at Charlie James Gallery. Ron English had been getting up to no good. Josh Levine had told me about his web show APP ATTACKS! THE QR CODE EDITION. The Cory Arcangel show was up at the Whitney.

Etc, etc. So I was prepared for nifty, but I wasn’t prepared for Paul to show me a sculpture that wasn’t really there. Daniel Franke’s “Sound Sculpture.” Is a work of art that exists in real time and in real space, but can’t be seen with the naked eye. You can only see it with a camera or computer — a digital lens that can decipher the series of large, printed QR codes that are all that adorn the walls. When you raise the screen, the piece appears. When someone walks into frame, you see them too, also right there. As you move the lens, it sees other pieces of code, and the sculptural object moves and you see other parts of it. It’s there all the time, in the same space that you’re in, but it lives in a parallel universe.

After that, I had a lot of questions for Paul about how I was supposed to deal with this insanity, and he was very generous with his time and ideas. I’m still not sure exactly how I’m going to handle this, but here are some of the more salient piece of our exchange over the weeks that followed, in which I struggle to understand, not so much the work itself, or even my personal experience of it — but rather, to understand how an evaluation of this work vis a vis my job as an art critic, was to be undertaken. As you’ll see, I’m having some trouble figuring out how to get past description and into evaluation and interpretation — in other words, I’m fine as a viewer, but I’m feeling daunted as an arbiter.

Hey Shana,
I’m sure you saw this article in the New York Times, which talks about the design show at MoMA. What is surprising to me is that this show, and the article, only focuses on how products—meaning industrial design pieces—are becoming increasingly interactive and thus, more intelligent. Yet it doesn’t talk about the revolution going on in contemporary art, where artworks can either “sense” a room or its viewers and change accordingly, or provide access to another, virtual world, which is far more radical and exciting than our own; a world full of real experiences and virtual objects.

Hey Paul,
I did see that, and I think I know why that might be the case. It’s like we started talking about it when I came to see Mods and Hackers — when it comes to design and technology, there are extant standards by which to evaluate innovations. Functionality, for example — what does it do and is it good at it? How are its look and purpose better or more modern or more delightful or sinister than whatever it is meant to replace. But when it comes to art, it’s not so easy. Like I was saying about that one piece you had — the sculpture that isn’t really there — that touched off an existential critic-crisis for me, because, you know, how the heck am I supposed to evaluate it, do my job as a critic, etc. without access to precedent or influence and without any familiarity with its materials. Should I go by sculpture standards, or video, or what!

I mean, is it generational? I’m nearly 40, and I’m tempted to just let it make me feel old and move on. But then again, I don’t know how to mix paint but I feel confident discussing paintings. So mere unfamiliarity with and/or fear of the unknown doesn’t fully explain it. I think it’s a challenge to my training in art history because it is without precedent in some sense. Do I judge that particular piece in the context of sculpture? Video? Performance? Drawing? Animation? If I’m reduced to mere description, I feel thwarted and irrelevant. If I try to force the work into an ill-fitting context, I deny its pioneering essence and do everyone a great disservice.

Hey Shana,
In terms of coaxing people to understand it, I’m constantly confronted by that problem! Those who have spent their lives learning about, and understanding, painting, sculpture and even installation, can have a lot of trouble understanding “new media” art. To them it’s utterly alien. Similarly, those who only know moving imagery through the movies or television, can also have difficulty in understanding it as well. For both I like to explain to them that the main thing is to look at it as an object. That’s all. It’s a thing that sits in a room or hangs on a wall. It just happens to be moving. Once you see it as a thing, or an object, you can come at it with the same conditions, values and prerequisites that you have for virtually any artwork.

Daniel Franke (who made that piece that wasn’t there) has devoted his entire practice to this notion of the “Post Simulation”, which is a term that Peter Weibel coined to describe our current age. What that means is that art has always been about a simulation of some kind, whether it’s the simulation of nature or an internal experience. And that simulation is the object—whether it’s a painting, book or movie. But with Post Simulation we can have “virtual objects” which do not exist in our world at all. At least not in our perception. But they can be experienced nevertheless.

Thanks Paul,
That actually made me feel a little better. Having a capitalized movement to refer to like “Post-Simulation” is just how I like it. But I’m still stuck on this idea of how to handle it as an art critic? How do I know if it’s bad, or if I’m the one that doesn’t get it? I don’t want to be the equivalent of the people who threw Impressionism on the garbage heap, I learned that lesson from Art History, too. I want to be on the right side of this. I don’t want to be too credulous or too skeptical. My job entails both teaching and learning.

Hey Shana,
I myself, have come to terms with some of these ideas by putting together <<<(((Mods&Hackers)))>>>. This new language of course, has to do with digital technologies, and specifically the Internet. I don’t think it’s overstating the case at all to suggest that the Internet may be the most profound change in our culture since the invention of the printing press. People are now saying that Second Life is the future of the web, and I believe that. I promise you, there will be a Duchamp of Second Life. So, as critics, artists and lovers of art, shouldn’t we be looking to the same area for artistic ideas? Duchamp asked, Can one make art that is not art? And of course, that has been the guiding principle for artists for nearly a century. Yet here we have artists who are either making works of art that do not exist in material form at all, or exist everywhere at once (on the web) for everyone to see simultaneously.

Yo Paul,
It’s so funny I’ve thought about that forever but maybe in a different way — thanks for sparking this memory — but in reading my Walter Benjamin I remembered all this business about the maker’s hand and the aura of the original. Now, whatever position one takes on those old-timey philosophies, we can no longer be certain that the idea of an original even retains its meaning. If something exists only online, then everyone’s laptop is an original — as distinct from an open edition which is still finite. Or are only the master hard-drives at the artist’s studio the original? Or am I the only one that cares about this kind of thing any more? Are questions like that themselves as obsolete as floppy disks?

In other news, I just got this press release: “Marco Brambilla, will screen his latest piece Evolution (Megaplex), a 3D video collage at the 68th Venice International Film Festival on September 9. This momentous event marks the first time, since the festival’s inception, that video art has been included as an “Official Selection.”

Are you stoked?

Shana! Hell yeah!! And I just heard about something that confirms my belief that the artists who are exploring new media are dealing with the most relevant questions of our age, and hence, in my mind, are the most “contemporary” of any of their peers. I just heard that you can now go to Google Street View (where you “walk” around any street in the world) and insert the avatar of your liking. More to the point, you can meet other avatars there and interact with them. Can you imagine? You can actually go to Berlin by logging in, where you can join your friends, shop, have coffee, talk, go dancing, whatever! I heard that this is still in the Beta stage, but the point is, it’s here!

Paul my dear,
Now I’m officially freaked out.

So backing up a bit, for those of you who, like me, had no idea such a place as MAH even existed, here’s a quick history. I found this photo essay by Layli Samimi-Moore and story from GOOD to be really helpful and informative about the history and the issues at stake. Mark Ayala, the dynamic and unflappable art teacher who is spearheading support for the project’s outdoor and indoor elements, speaks eloquently about its social benefits of free and equal expression, the channeling of emotion into non-destructive means, and the creative inspiration for the students (not just in the art department) of having access to this kind of museum-quality work. Walking those halls is like living in an art gallery, let me tell you. It’s like my dream of heaven! I was shocked to learn its fate was far from certain and its uniqueness not universally celebrated.

MAH has work by Kofie One, the Yo Collective, Herakut, ROA, Ewsoeism, Shark Toof, Aiko, Rabi, Buff Monster, Loraine Villarea, Mear One, and dozens of others whose names you know and whose art you recognize from simply being outside in Los Angeles are represented on the MAH walls — and despite the controversy, new work is appearing all the time. Fresh off an amazing show at LeBasse Projects (who are exceptionally knowledgeable about and supportive of this genre, and are getting ready to show Shark Toof in June) German duo Herakut’s contribution to the MAH family is directly across the street from the campus, facing the side of the building that sports the giant ROA mural. It had been finished the night before we arrived so our pictures were fresh and pristine, and we felt like we discovered something. The fresh Herakut work was covered in Arrested Motion (one of the very best street-art sites out there). Speaking of ROA, CLICK HERE for his epic contribution to MAH — for the record, this mural is the piece he chose to exhibit in MOCA’s current street art show.

All of this fulfills the promise of this very special place’s visionary creative history. Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston are both graduates of Manual Arts High — as is Soundlessons capo J-Logic. His mom was a teacher there for something like 35 years, and on the same occasion that brought us out (a graduation-time show and sale of student art) he and the Hit+Run crew were there with screens and decks to help celebrate. “When I was here, we didn’t have anything like this, we didn’t even have art or music class. But it was through one of the teachers that I got hooked up with an internship at Warner Bros Records…” The rest is, of course, Soundlessons and Hit+Run history. I’m still rocking my new “Free REVOK” shirt –a perfect reminder that now — when awareness, appreciation, and persecution of street artists are at an all-time high — is the time to act to protect the work at the MAH and elsewhere. Pass this around, see about heading over for a tour of the grounds, you’ll be blown away, and you will want to help.  Click here to see additional photos!

I. 22 Notes on Black Holes by Sidonie Loiseleux for the Material Press February Artist Edition. In the strictest and most exact sense, there are currently 14 known black holes. They are cold remnants of former stars. Black holes are small in size. One may go through a black hole to reach another universe. The term for the event that happens when something falls into a black hole is called spaghettification. This is the vertical stretching and horizontal compression of objects into long thin shapes in a very strong gravitational field. In black holes, the stretching is so powerful that no object can withstand it, no matter how strong its components. They absorb light and emit none. They are also called frozen stars or degenerate stars. Nothing, not even light, can escape it. One will merge with another black hole in close proximity. Often the larger ones will suck up the smaller ones. The center of a black hole, the singularity, is the point where the laws of physics break down. At a singularity, space and time cease to exist as we know them. No one has directly seen a black hole itself.

Permanent cavity #1 ( black hole) is part of a series of images related to displacement of matter. Permanent cavity is a ballistic term used to refer to the hole left by the passage of a projectile. The image was xeroxed 22 times. 22 is the number in million of black hole images you can find on the Internet. The image for this project was picked from the 22 million images brought up in a Google search. The accompanying text brings together 22 notes on black holes, chosen from the Internet.

II. Heather Carson
LA-based sculptor and installation artist Heather Carson was once a NY-based theatrical lighting designer whose experimental use of industrial equipment led her to leave the stage for storefronts, airplane hangars, parking lots, and galleries – pursuing her affection for the abstract mathematical structure of lighting-grids and the optical character of indoor/outdoor and spatial perception. Comparisons to Irwin, Flavin, Turrell, and Judd are inevitable, but this work is increasingly about the properties and limitations unique to the electric medium. Watch for her at May’s COLA 2011 show, for which I will have the pleasure of contributing some writing on her work to the catalog.

I recently taped an episode of the webisodic interview program Creative Current with Carson, which I’m told is “adorable.” We definitely had the girlfriends New York coffee chat vibe going, but I include her in this list, because as you’ll see in the story, we get to some rather sober mathematical material in talking about her creative process that I think place her squarely (oops, no pun intended) in this thread of the discourse. It was really (oh gosh, sorry) illuminating, to get a peek into certain things I wouldn’t have guessed, like that she looks at Josef Albers, and constructs the formal parameters of her series based partly on the mathematics electronics companies have already worked out, and partly on the ways in which the variables of indoor, outdoor, industrial, and theatrical lighting push our psychological and emotional buttons.

III. Convergence: Art, Memory, and Science In the work of Deborah Aschheim, Laurie Frick, George Legrady and Brad Miller at Edward Cella Art + Architecture Artists Deborah Aschheim (who recently had a gorgeous show at Edward Cella, Nostalgia for the Future), Laurie Frick (who just closed the show Sleep Patterns at Edward Cella), George Legrady, and Brad Miller (whose show at Edward Cella opens April 23rd) shared an overview of selected recent projects which set the stage for an engaging dialog about the function of artistic inquiry within the cognitive sciences including the roles of personal experience, data collection, and research. There are some media clips from the afternoon at the Gallery’s Facebook Page.

Deborah Aschheim is fascinated with architecture as a site of humanity’s creativity, history, experience, identity; its mechanisms of control, memory, and aspirations. Her expressively rendered drawings, sculptures, and installations also speak to buildings as sources of personal and conceptual inspiration. “All buildings speak to power, simply in the way that they are designed and constructed. The process of putting up a building is a narrative that leaves traces on the collective unconscious of architecture and cities.”

The links to neuroscience are entirely explicit in Laurie Frick’s large-scale sculptural constructions, which use individual objects as elements in an epic charting of human dream-time brain function. The room-filling installation gave physical form and mass to the elusive, abstract algorithms at the heart of what consciousness is.

IV. Brendan Monroe’s new book, Limbic Place. I’ve worked with Brendan before, creating an interpretive Index of Terms for a gorgeous book for him a few years ago. You can check that out HERE. His work has always sought to depict the most elemental origins of consciousness, so he has sort of re-imagined an allegorical universe composed of earth, air, and endocrinology. He once illustrated a New York Times Magazine story about neuroscience and the law, how perfect is that? Locally, he shows with Richard Heller Gallery, though he’s been living in Stockholm for a while now, and it seems to suit him.

This new project is inspired by the Limbic System in the brain, a group of organs that play an important roll in making us who we are; from creating memories to emotional chemical regulation to basic human instincts like sex and hunger. You can buy it HERE. It comes all the way from France, ooh-la-la.

V. Ron English’s solo exhibition You Are Not Here at the International Museum of Art & Science, McAllen, Texas.
My old friend Ron English is more prolific than ever. Between the numerous actions, pranks, guerrilla installations, and who knows what other illegal public art hi-jinx he gets up to, he’s found time to create an ambitious solo show for the International Museum of Art & Science. I like the take on his work that focuses on how he both appropriates and interrupts the accepted flow of information to the mass media culture audience. The press release articulates this scholarly approach to the work of the worlds best visual-art prankster. “For You Are Not Here, Ron English created large scale images modeled after the aesthetic of circus side show posters. The artist chose this motif to point to the fact that mass-media messaging often makes promises that are misleading; much like side show posters tend to promise the viewers an extraordinary experience. However, when one goes behind the curtain, one is often disappointed by what one actually discovers. In the IMAS “You Are Not Here” exhibit, Ron English uses the side show imagery to lead us to the inner sanctum where two mural scale re-imaginations of Picasso’s famous Guernica are revealed. In this way, the artist uses the techniques of mass-media to inspire the audience to contemplate how the American cultural experience is filtered through mass communication.”

VI. Cognitive Architecture From Biopolitics to Noopolitics
I will not attempt to restate the authors’ description of their own work. Partly because their prose is so… intriguing. Partly because I haven’t read it yet so can’t be considered educated on the subject. But I plan to! Here’s what they have to say for themselves, Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics, co-edited by Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich, brings together experts from a variety of fields to propose a new theoretical ‘Becoming Brain’ model in which evolving cultural conditions are coupled to the potentialities of brain and mind. This volume delineates the radical notion of how artists and architects affected by the changing discursive fields, inflected as they are by such notions as post-colonialism, feminism, film/media theory and racial politics, result in a reconfiguration of networks of attention and subsequently mutate the conditions of, for instance, the socius, designed urban space as well as changes in neurobiological architecture.” Read the rest of the post HERE <http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=171663986218324> .

VII: Art vs. Science’s U.S. debut EP, Magic Fountain.
Because like the eye, music is its own window to the soul. Watch the surreally hip, genius DIY artistry of the strangely relevant (to today’s topic) video for the first track HERE. “In the beginning there was a fountain. But it wasn’t just any fountain. It was a fountain of light; it was a fountain of truth; it was a fountain of dreams; it was a fountain of youth. It was a magic fountain.” I believe in this fountain. Even if science can’t prove its existence yet, art is making headway.

The cartographical profile of the “LA art world,” expanding outward like rippling waves from the concentration of venues in the central metropolitan area from Downtown to Santa Monica; outward across the Valley from Pasadena to Northridge; down past Long Beach to Laguna Beach and San Clemente’s OCMA; out to Claremont and Pomona, Riverside… okay is that a stretch yet? What about Santa Ana, or Santa Barbara? San Diego? Palm Desert, or Las Vegas? What about Akron, Ohio? Okay, that was a trick question, because I already know the answer. This Fall I spent a remarkable, some would even say bizarre, amount of time in the great American town of Akron, talking about Los Angeles artists — in particular, Lari Pittman. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it was actually all about a single major painting by Lari Pittman residing in the permanent collection of the Akron Art Museum.

I took two trips, the first in September and the second on November, as part of the Visiting Critic Series at invitation of the University of Akron Art Department, and the purpose of which (aside from making some intriguing studio visits in the studio department) was to present a scholarly investigation into the history and import of a given work. In this case, Thankfully, I will have had learned to break glass with sound, 1999, which the museum acquired from its gallery showing in New York City that same year. In between the original research visit and the eventual presentation, I was to research the work and come back with some original insight to offer. Now this was a particularly salient turn of events, as it turns out that I have family in Akron. And not just any family, but one with deep ties and a high profile in the city. My Aunt Faye, founded the Women’s Studies Program at the University, and her son, my cousin Keith Dambrot, is currently the Head Coach of the Zips, the university’s men’s basketball team. Some of you may remember my speaking about Keith before, as well as my grandfather’s extensive background in the sport. He’s the one that discovered LeBron James in an after school basketball clinic when LeBron was like 13, and then was his coach at St. V’s for most of James’ high school career. He’s all over the Buzz Bissinger book. It’s pretty rad, actually. So it was an honor and a total head-trip to be going to Akron, and to the University, this way. The lecture made Eventful Akron, which was oddly satisfying.

Okay, back to the lecture. Although it should be mentioned I veered wildly off script after about three minutes of the 45 allotted, this is still a pretty good document I think, even in outline form — so before it’s relegated to the dustbin of art history, I thought I’d post it here for you. I’ll include my suggested further reading list, in case you want the extra credit.

*************

LARI PITTMAN: High Notes
Outline for Shana Nys Dambrot lecture November 18, 2010, University of Akron/Akron Art Museum

INTRO:
Thankfully, I will have had learned to break glass with sound, 1999 I’ll be talking about Language as a compositional, descriptive, analytical, and metaphorical construct in the painting. Points touched upon include the verbiage used by fine-art critics to describe decorative arts as opposed to the operational language of decorative art itself; the sublimation of narrative impulses into a non-figurative idiom; symbolism in still life; the frenzy of simultaneous sensory input that characterizes modern existence; the Bauhaus and other people who take textiles seriously; and most importantly, the way Lari Pittman values beauty, pleasure, and pattern as expressive, quasi-narrative elements of composition, and extensions of his personal intentions.

SECTION ONE: CONTEXT
A. The painting was first shown at Barbara Gladstone’s Chelsea gallery in November 1999, close on the heels of the wildly popular LACMA survey of Pittman’s work from 1980-95, and opened in 1996. It’s worth noting, for followers of the art market, that his first solo show of new work after a major museum event would be in NYC. As an aside, I moved to LA from NYC in 1995, right as the Guggenheim, where I was working, announced their retrospective of Ross Bleckner, whose work, while very different from Pittman’s, dealt with romance and beauty in abstraction, and which some museum staff secretly called “the wallpaper paintings,” and not in a good way.

B. The critical and popular response to the 1996 LACMA survey, which covered 1980-95, was effusive. Everyone loved it. They even liked how he brought out selections from the Decorative Arts Department to include in the presentation — a dress, a still-life genre painting, a Persian manuscript, which he described as “ancestor portraits” for his own work. Many Angelenos would have been familiar with the Angelo Donghia showroom where Pittman worked for ten years (1977-87) as the studio was known all over the world for the intense luxury of its designs, especially the expressive, anything-but-vanilla textiles they produced. Pittman still works standing over a flat table. They would also have had some experience with LACMA’s extensive Latin and Asian-heavy decorative arts holdings, as it defined itself as an encyclopedic institution.

C. Reviews from NYC. Jerry Saltz said it felt like “the culmination of something rather than a jumping off point. Dealing with the decorative is not transgressive if you don’t deal with it in new ways,” and basically accused Pittman of being in a rut. Is that because he’d succeeded? In other words, is it Pittman that got stale, or did he just make his point so thoroughly that the work, despite its obviously advanced technique, was already feeling dated? Does it seem “dated” now, another decade later? Saltz pronounced 1988-96 as Pittman’s best years, in which “he had a Midas touch for decoration. The surfaces of those paintings erupted into meticulous, anti-Victorian porno passages: a cum shot splatter, layered in loving exactitude; a phallic candle dripping viscous, semenesque paint. The paintings of that period buzz with overheated Edwardian excess and crazy, compulsive fastidiousness.” Where, I can’t help but wonder, as I’m sure many of you who are artists might, was Pittman supposed to have gone from there?

D. The reaction of the Akron community to its acquisition. In May 2000, the Cleveland Free Times said, in what may be an elegant back-handed compliment for the ages, that “the painting [has] an entirely fresh appearance that seems in no way burdened by painting styles of the past,” in an article which also quoted the Akron Art Museum’s director as saying, “I think it’s quite likely that future historians may look back at the 1990s and find this painting to be one of the key works of the decade.” So, is it time to decide?

SECTION TWO: CONTENT
A. An extensive description of the contents, an itemization, inventory of the work. I’ll want people to help me look for objects in the moment, as part of what I’m looking to demonstrate will be the legibility and accessibility of the individual elements of the composition; as well as the sense of discovery inherent in excavating a Pittman image of this scale. Audience participation, looking for everything from architecture to motion marks, faces to vases, veils to vectors, and legible textual elements.

B. Text as a non-representational element of composition. For example, Buddhist and Islamic traditions with prohibitions on figuration (go into that) also developed such poignant and elegant design cultures from textiles to calligraphy to ceramics. Pittman has made extensive references to those traditions as inspirational, but this is more obvious in a general sense of Baroque exuberance than it is in specific content. “What I’ve tried to discuss — or perhaps in some cases to re-discuss as an art-historical matter — is that decoration is content and meaning, it’s not a surrogate for meaning. For example, the decorative impulse in Islamic art is also its philosophical meaning. That’s what I’m interested in in my work: decoration not being used to facilitate meaning but as meaning.”

C. Exegesis of the title, flourishes of “decorative” language used by Pittman as an element of style and composition and functionally of narrative, especially in conjunction with the objects when read as encoded symbolism. From Dutch floral still-life to Flemish altarpieces, to royal and historical portraiture, illuminated texts, and fairy tales. Pittman: “The use of the silhouettes in those very early paintings [for example] was not about discussing something specific or about autobiography or personal experience. They were simply being used as surrogates to discuss social conventions, human behavior, encoded behavior. The idea of code is always really important in the work, and surrogates can help you advance this idea. So although, visually, the work appears to have a very strong declarative voice, what is actually being advanced in the paintings is a subtext or a code. When you’re looking at the work, you’re looking at something visually declarative, but it requires a subtextual reading or a capacity or predisposition for reading code. That’s why I used the Victorian silhouettes. It was just a great conceptual armature to be able to filter social code through.”

D. The language about a thing versus the language of a thing… I’ll discuss non-art examples of power being reclaimed through language, from Mel Brooks to Rap to Sarah Palin. Pittman cites “Mary” as a West Village greeting. Many degraded cultures use this strategy to great effect.

E. Some of Pittman’s lengthier painting titles mention Victorians and Puritans, Wholesomeness, and make references to the Soul and to Faith — in referencing the spiritual, he is tapping into what may be the only more marginalized, denigrated thread in contemporary fine art than the Decorative. A personal favorite, from 1999, is “As a woman of 60, I will have had revealed the decor of my interiors.”

F. Bosch without the cautionary morality tale. Sensual appreciation as a kind of devotion. Camille Paglia’s Apollonian/ Dionysian dichotomy. Another, from way back in 1987, is called, “Where the expression of love will be encouraged (2385AD).” And the unique hand-made artist books in Orangerie, as well as the heavily worked series on paper, “Superstition, Noise, and Symbolism #1 – #10.”

SECTION THREE: COMMENTARY
A. Queer culture is less transgressive than decorative beauty or pleasure the art world worldview. Pittman talks extensively about the misogyny and bizarre hypocrisy of this construct, and relatedly, about how his paintings are “gay” only insofar as that represents a part of human experience. Why is weakness associated with the feminine? Why is appreciation of beauty considered a weakness?

B. New Yorkers always seem so mad when artists enjoy their lives, or live in California. Also why are people allowed to get lavish and indulgent in every aspect of life from fashion to decor, food to tattoos, but not when it comes to paintings. Pittman: “Institutionally, something colorful is perceived as suspect and perhaps not as serious as something that is tan and black and white.”

C. Regarding Pittman’s attempt to rehabilitate decorative arts (as when he pulled extensively from the Decorative Arts Department for the LACMA installation of his retrospective exhibition) — is this a pure love of beauty, an embrace of life after overcoming great personal challenges? Is it personal or polemical? Can it be all those things?  Robert Storr in Lari Pittman, Rizzoli, 2011: “…a flighty or decorative art that succeeds in speaking the truth where seriousness cannot, and so in its apparent superficiality replaces seriousness as the vehicle for meaning and feeling.” Pittman, “It’s genuinely artificial. And that’s something. There is always substance even in the superficial and artificial.”

D. Art History. LACMA curator Howard Fox: “The idealism central to the humanist tradition in Western civilization, which aspires to transcendence through love, beauty, and art, is central to Pittman’s own art, and he extols these traditional values in a startlingly original art form with meanings that are ultimately emotional, political, and philosophical.”

SECTION FOUR: CONCLUSION
A. The Orangerie exhibition at Regen Projects: a self-curated retrospective, organized by theme, tracing certain ideas over the course of their recurrence throughout decades. According to Wikipedia, an orangery was a building “frequently found in the grounds of fashionable residences from the 17th to the 19th centuries and given a classicizing architectural form. The orangery was similar to a greenhouse or conservatory. The orangery, however, was not just a greenhouse but a symbol of prestige and wealth and a feature of the garden, in the same way as a summerhouse, folly or Grecian temple. Owners would conduct their guests there on tours of the garden to admire not only the fruits within but the architecture without. Often the orangery would contain fountains, grottos, and an area in which to entertain in inclement weather.” The self-curated survey was a kind of closure, he proved, he broke the glass, and he’s loosening up, getting out from under the bell jar of his own
style-icon status. He said of the simultaneous show of new works at Regen that they were “the most Art Historical” he’s ever done.

B. Thankfully, I will have had learned to break glass with sound
Have we learned how to do that yet? Because now that we’ve looked it all over, it seems worth remarking that the phrase, borrowed from opera, is about something (usually a woman’s voice) so high and pure that it shatters solid matter. Glass, wine glass, Merlot… There’s still evidence of a suspicion of pleasure that is the hang-over of a Eurocentric depressive models of serious modernity that has dominated an adolescent American art world. The glass that Pittman is shattering with the sound of his voice might be the glass ceiling that keeps the joyful out of positions of power.

SECTION FIVE: CITATIONS & FURTHER READING
A. Lari Pittman interviews, writings and lectures.
B. PBS Art21 2007 episode on the theme of “Romance.”
C. Excerpts from forthcoming monograph from Rizzoli, Spring 2011
D. Jerry Saltz in the Village Voice, November 30, 2007
E. Dan Tranberg in the Cleveland Free Times, May 3, 2000
F. LACMA Exhibition catalog, interviews and essays, 1996
G. Terry Myers interview in the Journal of Contemporary Art, 1997

H. Suggested further reading:
Wayne Kostenbaum: The Queen’s Throat
Dave Hickey’s Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty
Orhan Pamuk: My Name is Red
John Berger: The Shape of a Pocket
Camille Paglia: Sex, Art, and American Culture
Carl Jung: Man and His Symbols

***********

Yeah, yeah, I know. Dave Hickey. You have to understand, I was trying to get into the nexus of weird, subversive beauty and rock music that is what I associate with, I had realized, both Pittman and Akron in entirely different ways; but I couldn’t find my copy of Invisible Dragon, so I went with my old friend, Air Guitar. I half-remembered, half-intuited there would be some insights for me in that book, some business about the real, the fake, the exuberant, the fey, and the unjust persecution of those who pursue delight and show emotion. So that’s what was swirling around in my jet-lagged brain when I arrived, and then after total immersion in four days of intensive, early-morning talks, studio visits and panels, suddenly it was my last day there. It started with a curatorial panel at the Cleveland Museum of Art (across a lawn from a Gehry business-school building), and featuring Margot Crutchfield, curator at MOCA Cleveland and wife of Kevin Concannon, the University professor who’d invited me to speak. Also on the panel, Chris Bedford, former Getty and LACMA curator, and now Chief Curator at the Wexner Center, in Columbus. Both he and Margot have devoted a significant amount of gallery space to Los Angeles artists, from Kori Newkirk to Mark Bradford, Megan Geckler, and Jorge Pardo.

I excused myself from attending the post-panel dinner, caught a lift back to Akron, and hit the Zips arena. After a long few days immersed in the LA art world of Akron, I ended up at an insane basketball game featuring buzzer-beating 3-point shots to tie, my legendarily ferocious cousin pulling a classic Dambrot maneuver, deliberately drawing a Technical by basically telling the Ref to suck it, in order to spark up the team’s defiant side, and a raucous victory in overtime. After a day that started out in a posh French bistro with an array of very savvy art folks, eating fried sauerkraut balls with the coaching staff of the Akron Zips and having the most amazing time, speaking the symbolic language of beer, game stats, and zone defenses. Yes, I said fried sauerkraut balls. Hickey also wrote an essay comparing art and basketball, to prove a point about the value of the valueless in culture. I think he’d be proud of me.

I spend a lot of time waiting—standing on sidewalks, sitting on benches that are far too close to the curb, because I get around the city by bus. Even when in motion, in transit, it’s still a waiting and watching game, something not so much empty as absorptive; not so much passive as receptive. I like to read; in fact I look forward to being forced to wait for the next thing, the arrival at my destination, largely because that relatively unplugged travel-time is the only time I can count on having the opportunity to actually read a real book. At home it’s too tempting to be working on something—and there is always something. On the bus, there’s nothing to do; the choice of book is an important part of the preparations for the journey. And in the meantime, with or without being an open book or having one in my lap, I can look forward to learning something new about my fellow humans.

Yes, I’ve learned a lot about Los Angeles riding the bus. Practical things like street names, neighborhoods, and demographics; personal insights that can only result from having time to think and that particular mental clarity that comes from forward motion; and more esoteric things such as finding that waiting can be its own reward; that having no expectation, and no attachment to a specific outcome beyond, perhaps, the safe arrival at your station, the end of a scene as measured in time rather than the accuracy of the itinerary, or reaching the other end of the unraveled rope. It’s a metaphor for life, of course, like everything, and for art, too, like most things. It teaches me to let go, like an exercise in relinquishing control, the better to realize and embrace that being (or attempting to be) in control of people and events is an illusion in general, and not all it’s cracked up to be anyway.

So I was already pondering about my bus-riding as a kind of durational performance series—not exactly without an audience, and always full of meaning, especially if like me, you happen to have an obsessive compulsion to read “the signs” and find the hidden patterns in unplanned events. And people love hearing about what “happened to me” on board—sometimes you get to watch strangers meet and fall in love, sometimes there’s a fight, or the most amazing outfit, or accent, or aroma. You get on the bus, and you just have to see what happens. It’s a bit like surfing maybe, or bird-watching, or meditating; but it’s physical, active, sometimes frantic, and never still. Patience is demanded but not expected. A sense of humor helps. So yeah, it’s kind of like performance art.

I’ve been hanging out at Rachel Rosenthal’s a lot lately, where in her role as director of her experimental theatre ensemble at Espace DbD she seems primarily to wait and see what happens on-stage. She sets up basic circumstances, and, along with the audience and the performers themselves, waits to see what happens. Last weekend as part of the Perform Now events in Chinatown, Micol Hebron sat on the floor of Jancar Gallery from 5-12pm, in a piece called Navel Gazing, during at least part of which she sat on the floor and looked at her vagina in a handheld mirror.  Audience members were invited to join her, or not. Discussions raged, sometimes compassionate and funny, sometimes honest and personal, sometimes contentious and even volatile. At one point while I was there (on the ring of chairs for viewers, not on the floor cushions, sorry) the talk turned to ideas of taboo, and just what Micol was getting at with all this private stuff going on in public, and she said, “I wanted to see what would happen.”

And starting this week over at Frumkin Gallery in the Santa Monica Airport Studios, Doni Silver Simons presents August, an installation and days-long performance event that keys to the poetic, formal possibilities of simply marking time; a circumstantial set-up by a painter whose work
commemorates and invites us to witness something that is just about to happen.

Last week there was quite a kerfuffle here in town, when MOCA sent out the press release for Soap at MOCA: New Performance Work by Artist, Actor, and Soap Character James Franco. I basically fell off my chair in a dizzying vortex of outrage and disbelief. The backstory: James Franco plays a serial killer/artist named “Franco” on General Hospital. Fake Franco uses real Franco’s paintings on the show (aka he uses his own); real Franco sometimes hangs paintings at Deitch Projects. Here’s what happens next. Fake Franco scores a solo show at MOCA; fake Franco suicides off the PDC; MOCA sends out a press release NOT for the filming, but for the July 22 air date of the “very special episode,” spinning the entirety of the hideousness as a legitimate performance art event—the first in a series that they’re supposed to be all excited about; the LA Times swoons from the heat of the genius. There is no irony, no knowing wink, no clue about how this might be received here. You’ll have to read it all for yourselves; I can never seem to make it all the way through without feeling a bit seasick.
As an aside, when I was growing up, “very special episode” meant eating
disorder, rape, and/or learning disability. I’m just saying.

I tossed it up on Facebook and people pretty much freaked out. That same weekend I was due to finish up my part in the Herculean efforts of the entire Art Squared Gallery committee to get things ready for Neighborhood Day in Pershing Square, plus the amazing City Listening party the night before, which truly anticipated the variety and beauty of experiencing art and architecture in this town. Looks like I’ll be presenting at the next one, so stay tuned for more on that. But I digress. Also right around this time, I realized that one of my friends (and favorite American painters) is on Work of Art on Bravo—the painter Peregrine Honig from Kansas City. She’s shown in LA, with Acuna-Hansen a few years ago, and she owns an artisanal panty boutique called Birdie’s. I keep meaning to join their Panty-of-the-Month Club. But more saliently, KC is legendary for its bold and well-funded public art program and availability of private funding for local artists, many of whom are world-class talents. And, perhaps even more saliently, the show is doing well. Why is that important? Well… Who else remembers Deitch’s failed TV show Art Star? I guess he just really wants to be on TV. If so, fine, do your thing, dude. Many others before you have made the pilgrimage to LA to score a TV gig. But please, please, quit it with the Marie Antoinette routine on the “mass appeal” tip. It’s not working for anyone…

So with all of this coming together at once, naturally I couldn’t help but wonder… What does it mean to be part of a community? Normally I am suspicious of that word, especially in an art context. But civic and political concerns seem to be dovetailing more and more these days; not to mention the increasingly hard-to-spot borderline between fiction and reality. We all know, or think we know, how little so-called reality TV has in common with, you know, reality. But when something like this happens, it seems like the TV version is in the lead. That’s profoundly meta, but not in a good way this time. On the other hand, the opportunities for quality pun-making are endless. Doctors without Boundaries? Wash your mouth out with Soap-at-MOCA? I’m not an artist, but I play one on a TV show about doctors? Moby Dick: The Blue Whale. What a Deitchbag!

The truly sad thing is that not all Franco’s paintings are the worst things ever, but that has now become quite beside the point. It’s the conceptual spin, the blatant pandering, the lowering of the bar, the assumption that great art isn’t enough to get people in the door. Maybe people stay away because this is the kind of laugh-track gruel they are fed. How can they expect any of us to take them seriously if they won’t even take their jobs seriously—and clearly aren’t taking us seriously? I bet the marketing people are having heartburn right now, because they know better than anyone the fraud they attempted to perpetrate on the LA art community. They are confirming our worst fears, and inventing new ones. It’s upsetting as a critic, but besides that, it’s really condescending toward “the public” in general and LA in particular. Does he really think that’s what it takes to get people in the door? What’s the aesthetic or taste-based link between soap operas and museum-going? Dennis Hopper, okay. Blatant but nearly legit, or at least one could make an argument in favor of the photographs. But honestly what gives? MOCA, if Mohammed can’t get to the mountain, the old saying goes, bring the mountain to Mohammed. It does NOT say, make the mountain stupid.

In the middle of putting all these thoughts together, my dear friend, the poet Rich Ferguson, sent me a new piece of writing posted at his website, the Nervous Breakdown. With his permission, I’ll share a few lines of “Mowing Satan’s Lawn” with you now…

“What’re you waiting for?
Get your ass up outta the gutter.
Move through life. And when you do,
do more than just imagine the lives of others.
Breathe their breath, beat their hearts.
Wear their faces.
Let your words be theirs, and their words yours.
And when you speak, speak loud and clear.

And when you speak,
speak only of strength, promise, and love.”

Speaking of getting my ass up, it’s time to check back in with our neighbors back at Pershing Square. See, we all figured people were smart enough that they deserved the most interesting art we could find. And we brought it right to the people, to Pershing Square—the center of the city, and it was awesome. People loved it; they stopped to ask questions, they participated, they took their pictures with it. And then on Monday they launched a fresh initiative supporting the state’s Art Lovers license plate—also a fine way to bring it to the people where they live—in their cars! Did you know that the California Arts Council is 60% funded by these plates? Check out this amazing math: one million cars with these special plates would equal $40 million in arts and arts education support for our public schools. Think about that, it’d only be 20% of LA, not even including the rest of the state. I don’t drive, but I’m thinking of ordering a pair anyway! I’ll put them on my bike, and ride over to the park.

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