.

*NEW LOCATION*
HIGH PROFILE PRODUCTIONS
5896 Smiley Drive, Culver City, CA 90232

Early arrival is suggested as this is a more intimate venue!

VITALIZE
Saturday, April 24, 2010  7pm – 2am : Gallery Preview 4-7pm

“We awaken this spring Vitalized, by the knowledge that all possess the power to

evolve and reinvent ourselves and the world around us. In a time when so much revolves

around conflict or passivity, by tuning in, showing up, and making LIFE happen, we move

everything forward. How will you Vitalize your life and the lives of others?

Come Vitalize with us and let us re-Vitalize you!”

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OPTICAL LOUNGE
ART : PHOTOGRAPHY : SCULPTURE : MULTIMEDIA : INSTALLATION : LIVE PAINTING

Aly Kourouma : Ando Pndlian : Brooke Shaden : Celine Diano : Chris Rowland
Crystal Sylver : George Jacob : Gunner Johnson : Jason Macaya : Kerianne Connor
Mads Christensen : Mario Canali : Patrick Haemmerlein : Walt Jones

LIVE PAINTING
Hans Haveron

FASHION/JEWELRY
Brooke Benson Designs : Delevo Designs : Maes Jewelry Designs
OSS Animal Medicine Jewelry : Simone Schulz : Victoria Reyna Designs

AUDIO LAB
HOUSE : TECHNO : DOWNTEMPO : WORLD RHYTHMS : LIVE MUSIC

George Sarah and String Trio : Mr.Caparro 16BIT&BEYOND – LA
Raffaele Live Flute : Eduardo Castillo The Eclectech/VOODOO : DJ D-Roc
AquaVee MissDreamedia/C:F : The Loomer Bass Ritual / Area 33

Read about the participating artists and musical talent here: Press Release

CURATED & PRODUCED BY Michelle Berc  MUSIC COORDINATOR Andrea Giardina

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SATURDAY, APRIL 24, 2010 : 7pm – 2am
$15 Admission before 9pm / $25 after
Limited $15 pre-sale tickets available online
until Wednesday, April 21st at 4pm!
Click here to purchase now!

GALLERY PREVIEW 4-7pm
*Kids Creativity Zone from 4-7 pm*
Gallery Preview $5 Suggested Donation

*JOIN CREATE:FIXATE’S PATRON PROGRAM AND RECIEVE SPECIAL DISCOUNTS
AND PERKS AT ALL OUR EVENTS! VISIT OUR WEBSITE FOR MORE INFO!*

FOR PRESS INQUIRIES PLEASE EMAIL lynn@greengalactic.com

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

A VERY SPECIAL THANX TO:

C:F Board Members, Staff, Volunteers, & Contributing Partners!

Click on the below links to support those who support the emerging art community!

“Liberate Your Perception”………… …………www.createfixate.com

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.

]]> http://www.createfixate.com/2010/07/urban-scrawl-005-the-c-in-moca-community-condescension-cash-and-chutzpah-aka-what-a-deitchbag/feed/ 0 http://www.createfixate.com/2010/06/best-in-show-winners-vitalize-april-2010/ http://www.createfixate.com/2010/06/best-in-show-winners-vitalize-april-2010/#comments Wed, 16 Jun 2010 23:36:57 +0000 michelle http://www.createfixate.com/?p=1766

A very special thank you to the following “Best in Show” Sponsors from our December event “Infinity” : DeviantArt, MOCA, Castelli Framing, and  Blick Art Supplies. The top three artists voted with the most popular-appeal will receive gift certificates from these companies.

The “Best in Show” winners from “Infinity” on December 5, 2009 are:

First Place: Michelle Nielsen
Second Place: Greg Boudreau
Third Place: Dave Lovejoy

We would also like to congratulate the following patron:

A Meal for two at  Royal Clayton’s goes to: Sarah Hamann

Thank you to everyone who participated!

We look forward to hearing from you at future events when we once again ask the question, “Who will be Best in Show” Thank you to everyone who participated!

To review past show winners, please click on the links below:

“Snap Flash” – September 2009

“Build” – June 2009 event!

“Wisdom Within Us”  - March 2009 event!

“Lucky 7″  - December 2008 event!

“AMP” – September 2008 event!

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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 Springs Art Museum — I’d even say it was a priority. But the second I walked through that heavy wood and iron gate into the miniature, conveniently located oasis of the Hacienda, that dream began to evaporate, to be replaced by a defiant, guilt-tinged giddiness at the thought of blowing off the art and just sitting by the pool with a book for a hot minute. As if to reinforce the point being made by my own subconscious mind, the only book I’d brought was Henry Miller’s Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. If you haven’t read it (it’s the only Miller I hadn’t yet read, for whatever that’s worth, so I’m done now as far as a I know, with his entire oeuvre) it’s about artists who go as far off the path as they can in a search for an unimpeded state of pure creativity and freedom from the oppressions of civilization — with mixed results. I’m seeing a pattern, as usual.

On the second morning we compromised, and took some of Farzad Kohan’s “Lost Paintings” into town. There they are in their foster homes: the décor section at the world-famous Angel View thrift store, and the Take One flyer bins at the local (closed, empty) real estate offices in a charming downtown courtyard dedicated to Don Quixote. As an aside, I think it’s time to rehabilitate the Man of La Mancha’s rep as a pioneering believer in the power of wind energy; like a Terry Gilliam version of T. Boone Pickens. No? Anyway we lost them there in Other Desert Cities, and we hope they find good homes. You can follow the progress of more of Farzad’s lost art works on his website or on Facebook — he’ll be participating as one of my artists in the upcoming Art Squared Gallery in Pershing Square at the end of June, losing paintings all over the park on Meet Your Neighbor Day — aka the best idea for a public
art event, with the worst name. I’m calling him
a sculpture. But as I was saying, where was I…?
Oh yes, there I was, losing it in the desert…

Tanja says, and she’s not the only one, that I deserve time off just like everyone else, and she’s right. In fact, I’ve been much better about that ever since my little mini-melt in February. I’ve been pursuing a more balanced existence, incorporating things like movies, farmers markets, reading, sleeping, cooking, and walking around into an art-heavy life itinerary. But the fact remains, much like a cop or a doctor, you can’t turn off “art critic” just because you’re on a vacation, or tired. When your job is to look at the world as closely as possible, what does it mean to be off-duty? So… When else would I be in the desert? Am I getting burned out? What’s my problem anyway? Can I smoke in here? These and other fascinating questions nearly threatened to get in the way of my beauty rest — until the second afternoon, when a lovely young man gave me the best massage of my life, expressed sympathy with my “writer’s knots,” and made me promise to get up from my desk and stretch at least twice a day from now on. His name? You can’t make this stuff up. It was Art.

Create:Fixate is excited to support Room To Read and participate in their
10 Year Anniversary Gala
This Thursday!  May 13, 2010 at the Historic Vibiana!

Musical guests include a special performance by Ziggy Marley and
Carmen Rizzo on the DJ decks!

We’ve gathered a handful of Create:Fixate artists who have created a specific art piece based
on their favorite book just for this event.  All art will be up for auction and 100% of  proceeds will
benefit Room to Read’s mission.

Participating Artists:
Blake Gardner : George Jacob : Daisy Rast : Dave Bondi : Ela Boyd
Jeff Klarin : Kazu Tabu : Leyla Akdogan : Monica Roache : Rebecca Johnson

Click here to purchase your tickets!
https://www.roomtoread.org/SSLPage.aspx?pid=648

Read on for details…

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 more have all arrived at my door. MoCA (aside from what I assume will be plans to highlight the new Hopper this summer) is putting out a brand-new children’s book (not a podcast or an infographic, but a proper book) exploring its collections. The Brooklyn Museum just received a gift of a collection of 11,000 art books, coincidentally from a woman I worked with at the Guggenheim nearly 20 years ago. Small world, and Brooklyn thanks you, Thea! Meanwhile, both LA and NYC are facing major fiscal crises that threaten the programming and accessibility of major public libraries, as well as, I would imagine, their acquisitions budget…

Well, as for acquisitions, as I remember reading in my faded Xerox copy of Benjamin’s “Unpacking my Library”, and herewith massacre through paraphrase, the best way to collect books the books you want is to write them yourself. If you’re curious, the galleries will all have copies already or right away, but I’ll be posting the essays over at my website, sndx.net. They’re not there yet, though, since I’m waiting until they’re properly published to send the full information around. Don’t worry, I’ll let you know when and where and how to snap them up… So in that vainglorious vein, keep a lookout for upcoming exhibitions from LA artists Julia Schwartz (5.15 at Bleicher-Golightly), Jim McHugh (5.22 at Timothy Yarger), and Jay Mark Johnson (in conjunction with the Venice Art Walk); plus work for Marine Salon (a July release of its first-year catalog) and the .ISM Polaroid Project catalog, due out this summer. I also wrote the copy for a new artist book from Yoskay Yamamoto, the first of a series of publications from LeBasse Projects.

Speaking of which, we must of course consider artist books as a wholly separate genre—those limited-run, individually finished art projects that take the form of a book but are widely understood to be closer to editioned prints or other non-singular works of art than to printed matter—and as a beloved hybrid art form with artisan publishers and avid collectors of its own. If anything, the ratio of originality to affordability they offer recommends them highly in this economy. They give curious collectors a chance to own something special by emerging art stars whose larger works have already been priced out of their (our?) reach; and a new show at the Land of Odd is dedicated entirely to this proposition, not to mention almost all of the salient exhibitions up at the Getty Research Institute, including the upcoming Monumental Prints show there. Also opening this month at Western Project is a curious, unsettling, and delightful book-based project from Arne Svenson, The Last Library, investigating the role of technology in the question of authorship and authenticity.

But there is another thread running throughout all this page-turning, and that’s the recent confluence of art shows/installations by artists that make art out of books, who destroy them in the process of using them as raw material for their work, sculptural, performative, interactive, and otherwise. And there are more than a few. I’m not sure how I feel about this practice. I love the delicious irony of separating books from their function; works like these manage to highlight books’ existences as objects precisely because of their destruction. This destruction itself, being in service of a larger idea, seems to honor the directives contained within the pages of the sacrificial tomes—an oroborus of the finest quality.

The artist Brian Dettmer seems to agree. I haven’t seen these dinosaurs (pun intended) in person yet, but I look forward to the chance. Have a look and read his artist statement too while you’re at it—I think he’s right. I remember when I moved here from NYC in the early 1990s, I saw a piece at Angles Gallery by Buzz Spector in which he had patiently removed slivers from pages of an open book, creating a sculpture that retained its function as a deliverer of written content only when viewed from a certain aspect, but more than fulfilled its function as a massive, intriguing, fraught, beautiful, and complexly referential sculptural object. Right around the same time, Dani Tull’s Rejected Written Material: Tilted Arc offered a genius lampoon of the imposing volume of discarded screenplays tossed in the dumpster in a given month in LA—so much that the artist was able to recreate Serra’s famously large and unpopular NYC sculpture on a fairly large scale with nothing but unwanted, and probably unread, stories.

And speaking of books you might love but can never read, one of my favorite things about the way Mike Stilkey uses books in his work has to do with the way he lets their ghosts persist into the conversation. He’s got that whole thing about honoring through divorcing from function down, building brick and mortar walls out of carefully selected/juxtaposed books as surfaces both intimate and monumental on which to paint. Like Duchamp’s urinal which became art because he said so, and because it was no longer able to be used as it was intended, Stilkey’s books, by being books, contribute to the content and form of his work in a way no other appropriated element could do. He leaves the titles legible on the spines for the most part, hitting notes by shorthand—Oh, look! Proust right next to Twain! I wonder what it means?—thus leaving the door open for them to add to the work’s actual narrative content in their original incarnation. It’s a fine line, absolutely worth walking.

A recent installation by Pascual Sisto at the mixed-use studio and exhibition space at 533 Los Angeles Street took this depagination and deconstruction to an alarming and charming extreme. For Absolutely Not, the artist built upon a previous series in which Gilles Deleuze and Guy Debord’s calls to radical thought and eventually to action were taken to a level the thinkers may or may not have appreciated—the sloughing off of old ideas symbolized through their physical transformation into a confetti party. Sisto has a penchant for high-brow humor expressed in populist, multisensory formats, and an argument could be made that the generation of collective experience fostering the reexamination of once-incendiary ideas in the context of a world those ideas have already transformed is exactly the sort of thing that generation of French intellectuals might have found delectable. My pocket is full of big ideas and silver stars, and I feel both smarter and more French because of it.

John U. Abrahamson’s installation at Bert Green Fine Art last month took a rather different approach, but also encouraged a course of deracination, digestion, and recapitulation. Flesh and Blood included a suite of paintings and a central sculptural installation—a kind of altar made of steel, glass, wood, suspended vials of the artist’s blood, and dozens of hand-written journals representing 15 years of quasi-illegible diary entries detailing the high highs and low lows of an agitated existence. Viewers were encouraged to pull out and keep pages at random, in an effort to help the artist purge this frenetic past and, I assume, start again tabula rasa. I have no doubt whatsoever about the powerful magic of his request, but I also intuited that were I to open myself to it, my participation could yield an oracular new form of intended literature, one with poetry and purpose for myself (the viewer, not the critic)… So I pulled out each of the page 23s that remained, pulled off the top lines of each, and here’s the collaboratively fractal action-poem that resulted. I kind of like it, but you tell me.

I’m calling it, “Come out the other end…”

Come out the other end dry as a bone. We will have to see about New York…

Indeed upon the right path. I don’t know right now; all I want is to get caught up on bills so I will continue to work as hard as possible until that happens.

Physical labor and pooled tips so there isn’t any back-biting or fucking high-school politics.

Something tells me I cannot do the soft pack anymore.

All I will be left with is guilt and regret.

I’ve got him to a point where he can care for himself and I die.

Enough talk.

What can I tell you? That I have masturbated with a dildo?

Blood. This could symbolize my art.

I tend to gravitate there when I want to self-destruct.

All that aside, as I have stated on numerous occasions…

I am desperate to email her and thank her for driving up and dropping off the money in such a timely manner.

Realize that this will take entirely too long.

To pull extra shifts just to stay afloat.

Washing away in blood.

My new mantra, I suppose.

I have been drinking again. Too much. Get drunk almost every night, alone in the dark, late at night,

But lost within the light of the day. Oceans and oceans of regret.

I would never have guessed in a million years that I would be married to a beautiful woman.

Then I have to deal with the stupid cable bill.

Damn, man, that is good coffee.

Greet this line with open arms. My life has so many wondrous things.

Perhaps there is the play I really should be reading!

Then coming across a pack of dogs straining against their leashes, held by a single man.

Night. Christ, I didn’t get to be until almost five o’clock.

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LOS ANGELES, CA – Arts organization Create:Fixate will host its first art event of 2010, Vitalize, at a fabulous new location, High Profile Productions, a photo studio and event space in Culver City, California. The exhibit will take place on Saturday, April 24, 2010 from 7:00 p.m. – 2:00 a.m. Taking on a more intimate format, this show will feature twenty-five top local artists, DJs, and musicians with vibrant artwork and music. High Profile Productions is located at 5896 Smiley Drive, Culver City, CA 90232.

High Profile Productions (HPP) is a new multi-use facility serving media producers, photographers, event planners, educators and the design community. Its focused approach has been shaped by a passion for inspired design, cutting edge media technology and a high level of luxury services. Located in burgeoning Culver City in the heart of the Art District, HPP sets itself apart by functioning as a state of the art production studio featuring three distinct studio spaces. A full-service event location, HPP will host a revolving calendar of art/media events showcasing a number of prominent artists working in various mediums with a focus on community driven projects.