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... [Read more]

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... [Read more]

. . . . . . . . . . . . . Urban Scrawl 004: The Desert of Lost Art Photography by Tanja Laden This mid-June, on a very special edition of Urban Scrawl, we discuss what it means to take a vacation from work, when your job itself is to be curious, and to look at everything you can get your eyes on. How in the world does someone like me take time off from that? I mean, short of a narcotics-infused stay in a sensory deprivation chamber, what am I supposed to do when I want to get away? All the good cities are cultural destinations; you can’t take an exit off any American freeway it seems without being directed to a richly endowed, starchitect-designed regional museum — even, make that, especially, Palm Springs (where I ended up locating my little experiment in consciousness R&R). I’ve included a good number of pictures from my stay at Hacienda Hot Springs and a short day-trip into town, but only a handful of them are of fine art — and even those are a gesture against the relentlessly incoming tide of information, as you’ll see. When my Flavorpill colleague Tanja Laden (who took all the pictures, except the ones she’s in, which I took) and I headed out for our mid-week weekend, I honestly fully intended to check out the art scene out there. Heather James, Melissa Morgan, Shag, the Palm... [Read more]

Urban Scrawl 003: Books: They’re not just for Reading Anymore A few weekends back the LA Times Festival of Books took over the UCLA campus, staging an orgiastic marketplace for the written word that almost had me believing people still buy books. I’m not talking about whether or not people still read—I’m talking about the actual, traceable, physical acquisition of paper-and-ink books whose dimensional bulks take up space on the shelf in addition to (instead of?) their contents taking up space in the brain. The Hammer’s current exhibition exploring the famed Red Book of Carl Jung perhaps provides a lone example of cooperation among the qualities of both; offering a metonymical fusion of sensory experience and narrative content that examines the operations of the mind’s attempt to comprehend its situation, and seems to celebrate art as a useful bridge between the two. As an aside, don’t you think it’s interesting that Kindle as a brand name evokes fires, given that the pyre has been the fate of so many of history’s most important literary efforts? At any rate, I’ve always assumed that the art world’s slice of book paradise is fundamentally safe from the trend toward content-disembodiment. Just in the last few months, gorgeous new monographs from Kim Gordon, Dana Schutz, Charles LeDray, Dennis Hopper, and many... [Read more]

Urban Scrawl: 002: A Bridge to Faraway—Leonardo’s Erector Sets The Getty has an intriguing exhibition up right now; a small but salient assembly of drawings and sculptures meant to illuminate the formal and conceptual foundations of Leonardo da Vinci’s elusive, unverifiable sculptural practice. I say unverifiable because even the curators admit that no actual sculptures can be definitively attributed to him; the sculpted works in the show belong to his contemporaries. That said, it seems to me that his engineering-style designs for monuments, fountains, stage sets, and various contraptions certainly exist as precursors to three-dimensional objects. Especially when you look at sheets like Studies for the Casting of the Sforza Monument and both sides of Studies for the Christ Child with a Lamb; notice the consistently evocative yet precisely descriptive way he treats the human and animal anatomies as well as the machineries with the same even-keeled, yet passionately attentive documentarian’s voice. The first art history report I ever did was in sixth grade, on Leonardo da Vinci and the Mona Lisa, but that doesn’t make me an expert. Fortunately for us all, my friend Louis Buff Parry, a researcher, scholar, artist, poet, provocateur, and candidate to be named Historian Laureate of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, is. I met him... [Read more]