The Curators Battle is a pretty direct title for an experimental concept event. The Grimmuseum hosted two curators, Carson Chan and Aaron Moulton, who each organized separate shows in adjacent galleries, pulling work from the same artists. For added drama, there was a vote to choose the better show. At it’s best, forcing the audience to consider the behind the scenes development of an art[…..]
My natural tendency, when looking at trash in an art gallery, is to play detective and treat the waste as anthropological evidence. For her solo show at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Karin Sander has cut six holes in the floor of the gallery’s administrative office where trash cans used to sit. Located directly above the gallery, the administration’s waste now falls down from the office space[…..]
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 The first time I visited downtown Los Angeles, I was surprised by its bareness. A friend and I, both of us art students, had driven in from Claremont for an opening, tackling the congested Santa Monica freeway for the first time, too. A fellow student and L.A. veteran had warned us that,[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley On November 2nd, 72 year-old Jerry Brown, a walking archive of California radicalism, gave his gubernatorial acceptance speech from the stage of Oakland’s Fox Theater. “Now look,” he said, with let-me-level-with-you straightness, “I like the symbolism of this theater because it was dark and . . . there were people camped in[…..]
Art House at the Jones Center, a contemporary art space in Austin, just reopened in a brand new building designed by New York based architects Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis. By far the most stunning of its six inaugural shows is Cities of Gold and Mirrors, a film by the young French artist and recent recipient of the Prix Marcel Duchamp, Cyprien Gaillard. Cities of Gold and Mirrors is[…..]
