This past Sunday, under the beating hot Los Angeles sun, LACMA finally held its inauguration ceremony for “Levitated Mass,” the 340-ton piece of California granite which traveled for 11 days at 8 miles an hour through Southern California, eventually to be placed across a 456-foot long trench in the northwest quadrant of LACMA’s campus. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was there (his speech was mediocre). County supervisor[…..]
In 2010, David Shields gave us ‘Reality Hunger’ — a mashup of over 600 stolen quotes, arranged into a manifesto. ‘Reality Hunger’ was Shields’ attempt at an ars poetica for what he referred to as ‘a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists […] who are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work.’ This week, curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev gives us her version[…..]
#Hashtags features writing about art at the intersection of both pop culture and politics, but what does it mean for a work of art to be political? #onartandpolitics will feature occasional interviews with writers, artists, and curators on this topic, kicking off with Matthew Harrison Tedford, an editor at Art Practical and a #Hashtags contributor. DS spoke with Tedford last year as he coordinated programming[…..]
As part of our ongoing partnership with Art Practical, Daily Serving is sharing Danielle Sommer’s article on Riga 23’s Programa Espacial Autónomo InterGalactico, at REDCAT in Los Angeles. The Portuguese artist Ricardo Gouveia, or Rigo 23, might be best known for his series of larger-than-life, one-way-sign-inspired murals, painted on buildings across San Francisco, where the artist has lived since the 1980s. For the better part of[…..]
40,000 bottle rockets make for a lot of noise and a lot of glare. Especially when they come hurtling toward your face. On April 7, 2012, artist Cai Guo-Qiang — known for his gunpowder drawings and performative “explosion events” — opened Sky Ladder at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary location with just such an experience. Called Mystery Circle, the event was pure spectacle. Over a thousand people[…..]
Human animals have at least as many seasonal habits as our less verbal counterparts (ahem, other mammals). We stuff our faces to prepare for winter, sleepwalk all the way through “the dark season,” and then hop straight into cleaning, organizing, and mating when the sun finally comes out again. One other rite of spring: Americans’ blissful ignorance of International Workers’ Day – aka today, May[…..]
What makes a tale “twice told”? For Nathaniel Hawthorne, who published a collection called Twice Told Tales, these were stories that had already lived one life by having been previously printed. And for William Shakespeare, who coined the phrase, a “twice-told tale” was the most tedious tale of the lot, borrowed and uninspired. Shakespeare, however, had not met Stephanie Washburn. In the case of Washburn’s[…..]
