“It is so very hard to become a man. . .Everything threatens to beat us down, to strip us of our biological birthright, to destroy us simply for asserting our essential, metaphysical manliness.” – Roger D. Hodge, Onan the Magnificent: The Triumph of the Testicle in Contemporary Art (2000) Today, Matthew Barney will receive the prestigious Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award during the San[…..]

In a former life, Walead Beshty may have rubbed elbows with Patti Smith. Flaunting her contemptuous disregard for the cautionary advice of her peers, Smith famously denounced words as mere “rules and regulations” in her rendition of Van Morrison’s “Gloria.” In one unruly, titillating performance, Smith flipped the good ol’ boys’ fraternity of rock and roll on its ear by lampooning the muffled sexism of[…..]

The year is 1999. Television has adapted to the more violent nature of man. Sterling Ruby‘s solo show at Sprueth Magers drops you into a space reminiscent of the real world, but reflected through an alternate lens. The main room feels overwhelming in scale, full of over-sized and crudely modeled ceramic sculptures, towering red dripping sculptures that look like some sort of giant animal’s tendons[…..]

The paintings of Dresden-based Christoph Roßner have the power of a waking dream.  As opposed to our regular, logically- and visually-tangled dreams, the visions we have right before we fall asleep – or even in the middle of the day – tend to focus on single objects:  things recognizable but out of reach, comforting but not quite tangible.  Slow and atmospheric, they demand time and[…..]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley A river of blood runs through the history of womankind,” wrote cultural critic Caitlin Flanagan, with so much dramatic sway that the truthfulness almost got lost in the motion. “That river stops, more or less, with the installation of [a] shag carpet.” The carpet in question—lush, blue and all the rage in[…..]

Hidden within the hard facts are things too complicated and involved to be considered with too much precision. Economists and scientists choose what to measure when running their reports with good reason: if they eliminate the extraneous data than the utility of their predictive models increase. This process hides what Gabriel Kuri calls “soft information in hard facts.” His sculptures are attempts to reclaim that[…..]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley When Richard Strauss’ indulgent opera Ariadne Auf Naxos had its U.S. premiere at the Met in 1962, critic Everett Helm was more than underwhelmed; he was exasperated. The whole show, he wrote, “makes dupes of the audience, being all form but having no real content.” It was “theatrically flabby,” “silly and contrived.”[…..]