L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Some Other Spring, the title of Jack Pierson’s current exhibition at Regen Projects, is also the title of a characteristically sultry but otherwise unremarkable Billie Holiday single. In it, Holiday mourns lost love in a way that’s lushly comfortable and totally unmotivated, clinging to “faded blossoms” that have been “crushed and torn.”[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Billboards promoting HBO’s How To Make It In America began appearing in Los Angeles in January, or at least that’s when I began noticing them. They didn’t make sense because they weren’t any of the things billboards often are: explicitly sexy, youth-worshiping, polarizing, lush for no reason, symmetrical, centered, excessively air-brushed, heavy-handed,[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley There’s a sweetly prophetic story about Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in Calvin Tomkins’ iconic art-crowd chronicle, Off The Wall. The story, which makes the gap between innovation and belonging look extremely narrow, goes like this: it was the summer of ’55 and Johns and Rauschenberg lived symbiotically, popping in on each[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Josh Harris welcomed the new millennium from the basement of a New York bunker. He was surrounded by a posse of jumpsuit-clad creatives, and, at one point, all of them watched as a naked man whipped a barely dressed woman around underneath a running shower head. The scene made about as much[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley The Pew Research Center caused a stir this week when it released a study portraying The Millennials, those who came of age during the first decade of the 21st Century, as the most even-tempered generation in recent history. Unlike the Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers, The Millennials have sidestepped almost all reactionary[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Hans Holbein painted The Body of the Dead Christ Laid Out in His Tomb in 1521. In it, Christ’s harrowed face and tortured body don’t actually look dead; they look comatose with pain and on the verge of dying, but not quite gone. The fact that most of his peers took a[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley In a Bridgestone Tires ad that aired during last Sunday’s Super Bowl, a car resembling the Batmobile speeds along a dark, rainy highway. It turns a corner and slams on its breaks to avoid hitting a brightly lit roadblock set up by eccentric-looking villains. The villain in charge says, over a loud[…..]
