As part of our ongoing partnership with KQED Arts, today we bring you a thoughtful consideration of Levi’s Station to Station project. Author Christian L. Frock notes, “Though it seems unlikely that corporate benefactors will support politically potent, radical, or controversial artworks, perhaps the support leveraged by these popular and populist ‘public art’ opportunities will allow artists to engage in work that challenges us to think differently about the world around us.” This article was originally published on September 9, 2013.

Promotional image for Levi’s Station to Station project, 2013; organized by artist Doug Aitken

Over a period of three weeks this month, a public art extravaganza featuring a changing cast of “artists, musicians and creative pioneers” will make its way across the country by rail. Station to Station, as it is called, is a project by multi-media artist Doug Aitken and made possible by Levi’s, whose corporate sponsorship has quietly supported a number of recent public art projects. The list of participants in Station to Station is an impressive array of creative personalities — too many to list here — including Patti Smith, Ernesto Neto, James Turrell, Alice Waters, Theaster Gates, Olafur Eliasson, and Nam June Paik, among many others. The train started in New York with stops in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Santa Fe, Winslow, Barstow, and Los Angeles along the way — this magical mystery tour will end in Oakland on September 28. As of this writing, tickets are still available for the concluding event in Oakland’s historic 16th Street Train Station.

Read the full article here.

Brooklyn-based artist Andy Ralph’s artistic practice could be summed up as a series of calculated—yet remarkably broad—risks. There is, however, one unifying identifiable approach in his work: Ralph engages with the imaginary potentials that reside in utilitarian objects. He transforms objects, or object-structures, into humorous, critical, and provocative configurations that provide a depth of both aesthetic-visual texture and conceptual rigor.

Andy Ralph. Manifold Destiny, 2013; Galvanized chain link fencing; 144 x 144 x 360 in. Courtesy of L&M Arts, Los Angeles & E Lee Smith

Ralph’s projects range from Manifold Destiny (2013), a meticulously coordinated outdoor installation of chain-link fence sections at L&M Arts, in Los Angeles, which takes its cues from minimalist sculpture, to his series of handmade faux-tools and hardware, Apparently Useless (2006). Of his relationship to humor and his wide range of materials, Ralph says: “My work always makes me laugh but only after it’s installed. It’s that first moment outside of the building process when I’m not fixated on the joinery, the hardware, or the material limitations; that’s when I can stand back and finally see the layers of absurdity. I’m really into how sinister the act of creating faux-objects is.”

Read More »

Eva Speer’s works at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art in Portland, Oregon, demonstrate the artist mixing the expressive qualities of abstraction and minimalism with a rich materiality. The fourteen works in Alone Together (all 2013) combine the cool sensibility of synthetic materials with candy colors and natural forms, and the effect is often impressive.

Eva Speer. Game #4, 2013; cast resin, acrylic, latex paint; 15 x 15 in.; Courtesy Charles A. Hartman Fine Art

As the title Alone Together suggests, many of the panels in Speer’s Game series have two or more bodies of latex paint set adrift on a fifteen-by-fifteen-inch hand-cast dyed resin panel. Game #4 is one of the standouts in this series, a half-inch-thick ruby red square that glistens like an outsize cherry candy, with two drifts of pinkish-white and red marbled latex. The paint is built up thickly—sculpturally—like fondant, and there is a very sensual play of textures and colors. If the two paint forms are indeed alone together, then they seem to yearn for one another: their facing edges have a symmetry, so that the left mass has a concavity just where the right mass is convex; one can imagine them fitting together like continents before a rupture.

Read More »

Today we bring you a video of artist Tim Lee in conversation with Joseph del Pesco, director of Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco. Lee, who is based in Vancouver, discusses his thoughts and processes as he re-creates a Warhol photograph from 1980: “It’s always…how can I articulate my artistic identity through others…what are some of the dissonances and what are some of the continuities?”

An unattended bag of garbage amid a pristine installation is quite a thing to behold. At first instinct, one can barely believe the carelessness. Perhaps, in the haste of opening night, preparatory staff neglected it—or, in the case of Lifelike at the Blanton Museum of Art, one should reprimand oneself for failure to look closely enough.

Alex Hay. Paper Bag, 1968; Fiberglass, epoxy,paint, and paper; 59 1⁄4 x 29 x 18 in. © Alex Hay. Courtesy of the Artist and Peter Freeman, Inc., New York. Photo: Jerry L. Thompson.
Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Titled Hefty 2-Ply (1979–81), the garbage bag is a flawlessly convincing marble sculpture by artist Jud Nelson. It’s a wonder it has yet to be tripped over, as the experience of navigating Likelike is a mix of navigating traditionally installed works on walls and pedestals, with subtly placed sculptures that initially defy logic within a gallery space. The exhibition (terminating at the Blanton after a four-stop tour from the Walker Art Center) presents a large collection of hyper-real paintings, photographs, sculpture, and environmental installations that pay homage to everyday, overlooked subject matters. The majority of the works were selected for their dedication to handmade techniques or intensive labor. Attempting to avoid a slick, overtly Pop art aesthetic, Lifelike’s milieu is far more visually tedious. For one, Ruben Nusz’s Nothing good happens after midnight/everything good happens after midnight (2008) nearly avoids detection by even the keenest eye. Tucked away in a solitary corner is a half-filled ashtray that would appear recently discarded, if not for the lack of lingering smoke. The tray and cigarettes are sculpted from wax and resin, the ashes procured from the cremation of someone, or something, undisclosed. While the glorifying of ordinary objects was in large part the bread and butter of Pop art in the 1960s (thank you, Andy Warhol), it is a subtle element in Lifelike—courtesy of artists like Nelson and Nusz—that keeps the exhibition from ubiquity. Another stand-out in this vein, Still.life. (cardboard leaning on the wall) (2009), by Swiss-born Ugo Rondinone, is a bronze cast as deceptively flimsy and beat up as cardboard abandoned after a strenuous moving project.

Read More »

#institutions #race #jeffreydeitch #elibroad #lacma #moca #manifestdestiny #americanexpansionism

Los Angeles museums have recently demonstrated the old adage that “nothing endures but change.” Since 2006, Michael Govan has been in charge of transforming the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from a Victorian-style encyclopedic museum into a powerhouse for contemporary art. During his tenure, Govan has recruited top American curators, including Franklin Sirmans and Christine Y. Kim, from privately endowed museums to his massive public institution. More recently, in 2010 the Museum of Contemporary Art appointed celebrity gallerist Jeffrey Deitch its director following a very public declaration of bankruptcy and a sizeable bailout from trustee Eli Broad. Deitch and Broad wasted little time changing the MOCA guard, raising a furor over the departure of longtime chief curator Paul Schimmel. In July 2013, Deitch announced his resignation from MOCA, news of which was received by many contemporary art insiders as evidence of L.A.’s regressive tastes in art and institutional politics. However, it is neither the case that L.A. is too conservative for a “visionary” museum director such as Deitch, nor is it true that the presence of forward-thinking agents such as Sirmans and Govan proves the city’s progressive bona fides.  Rather, both museums continue to demonstrate the challenges of reconciling the underpinnings of contemporary museums in nineteenth-century ideologies with twenty-first-century concerns of artists and audiences.

James Turrell. Key Lime, 2004. Wedgework: fluorescent and LED light into space with fiber-optic light. Dimensions variable. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Renvy Graves Pittman, M.2013.3. © James Turrell. Photo © Florian Holzherr

At LACMA, the presence of leading curators of color on the museum staff has had its most visible impact by way of acquisitions to the permanent collection. Such acquisitions have their strongest effect in posterity, as new voices are incorporated into the canon that future historians will reference in writing the narrative of American art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. However, the majority of permanent collection works remain in storage for the time being, accessible to few. Temporary exhibitions that showcase the career output of a single artist are the most visible way in which museums can have an immediate effect on artists’ profiles. Since 2009, when Sirmans joined the museum staff, Glenn Ligon is the only artist of color to receive a one-man retrospective at LACMA. Another retrospective, by Chicano collective ASCO, brings the number of retrospectives by artists of color since 2009 to two. Compare this with retrospectives for Franz West, Blinky Palermo, Michael Heizer, John Baldessari, William Eggleston, David Smith, Tim Burton, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Adams, Ken Price, and Ellsworth Kelly in the same four-year period, and you start to see how slow change is to emerge from even the most proactive museum staff.

Read More »

Most of the time the best information, advice, and stories we hear come to us from faraway places, whether it be by location or time. In today’s case, we bring you a ten-point lesson on John Baldessari written by Rebecca Taylor for the Huffington Post, reposted here at Daily Serving and now revisited once more as our entry today From the DS Archives. One particular student of Baldessari’s teachings is artist Matt Mullican (whom we featured in this post). Mullican’s show Cosmology is on view through September 15 at Joblonka Galerie in Cologne. The following article was originally published on July 10, 2010.

Today on Daily Serving, we have gone to our wonderful friends at the Huffington Post for a brilliant article on the Baldessari retrospective, Pure Beauty, at LACMA. Los Angeles–based arts writer Rebecca Taylor eloquently lists some of the lessons learned from the work on view.

John Baldessari. Pure Beauty, 1966–68; acrylic on canvas; Courtesy of Baldessari Studio and Glenstone

1. It’s all relative, especially Beauty

I can’t imagine a more fitting title for Baldessari’s current retrospective (on view at LACMA through September 12, 2010) than Pure Beauty. The exhibition title references an early Baldessari work of the same name from 1966–68, an off-white canvas with the phrase literally painted in black, capital letters, and was explicitly selected by the artist himself. From the dawning of Greek Classicism to well beyond the Italian Renaissance, artists learned to faithfully master contrapposto, linear perspective, and the like in order to achieve the great, mythic aspiration of beauty. Room after room in the exhibition reminds the viewer of the ubiquitous, albeit trite, truth that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For example, in Choosing (A Game for Two Players): Carrots (1972), Baldessari asks two participants to impose their own aesthetic criteria upon a grouping of carrots (or green beans in the case of Choosing: Green Beans [1971]). As participants select the carrot that appeals most to them, said carrot is advanced to the next round and compared against two new carrots and so on and so forth. Ultimately this “faux exercise of taste,” as David Salle calls it, communicates the message that if there isn’t even consistency in scrutinizing a vegetable, how could we possibly impose a universal definition of beauty? Long coveted, it continues to elude us.

2. The rightness of wrong

In 1996 art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau penned the essay “The Rightness of Wrong,” which praised Baldessari’s now infamous hybrid painting/photograph Wrong (1966–68). The image shows the artist purposefully disregarding the “rules” of photography. He positions himself in the shadow of a giant palm tree. Its leaves seem to emanate from his head, as he stands directly facing the camera in front of an ordinary tract home. Embracing “the wrong” extends well beyond this singular work and infiltrates Baldessari’s entire oeuvre, whether it’s circumventing the essence of a portrait by obliterating the face of the sitter (Portrait: Artist’s Identity Hidden with Various Hats [1974]) or using subliminal seduction á la the panned low-art of advertising—to sell himself in his works (Embed Series: Ice Cubes: U-BUY BAL DES SSARI [1974]). Baldessari proves time and again that it’s right to be wrong.

Read More »