L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley When Light and Space sculptor James Turrell installed one of his light tunnels at the Whitney Museum in 1982, a woman leaned against a wall she thought she saw, fell and broke her wrist. She happened to be the wife of the Oregon State Supreme Court Chief Justice, and subsequently sued the[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Around 1970, painter David Hockney was in London feeling listless. Or at least he was according to Jack Hazan’s 1974 documentary, A Bigger Splash, which portrays Hockney as a lovesick, indecisive genius. The original NYTimes review of Hazan’s film called it “unforgivably solemn, something that Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey would never[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley “There are no easy happy endings anymore,” said writer David Levithan when interviewed about The Lover’s Dictionary, a novel told entirely through “definitions” of words like “aberrant” and “quixotic.” But there are no easy sad endings anymore, either–even though the romance the book dissects is doomed from the start, Levithan indulges in[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Maybe it’s an American thing, a hanger-on Puritan fetish, but I can think of few qualities more seductive than discipline. It seems like the quickest path to perfection, and as much as I purport to accept—even celebrate—“idiosyncrasy,” “peculiarity,” “limitation,” they’re all consolation prizes, the realities you force yourself to love once you[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Clicking through TIME Magazine’s “Most Unforgettable Images” of 2010 feels a bit like watching a missionary slideshow at an Evangelical tent meeting. There are helpless bodies, flames, sweeping gestures and unsettling blue skies, all tied together in concentric compositions. What’s more, each image seems certain its viewers will intuitively understand why and[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Bing Crosby died a month before Merrie Olde Christmas aired on national television. The holiday special included one of the most unexpected and fortuitous duets of the crooner’s career: a pairing with David Bowie, then fresh off of Station to Station. Bowie and Bing, over forty years apart in age, performed a[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Pierre Restany, the critic who co-coined the term Nouveau Réalisme, was supposed to be there for Yves Klein’s first Leap into the Void. Weeks earlier, Klein had told Restany “he was going to do something very ‘important.’” He was “going to give a practical demonstration of levitation,” and he wanted Restany to[…..]
