Doug Aitken is a quintessential Los Angeles artist. Working across multiple platforms—“photography, sculpture, publications, sound, and single- and multi-channel video installations”[1]—he employs the high production values and superficial slickness of Hollywood. His art is all about spectacle, whether it’s Electric Earth (1997), his multi-screen video in which a solitary protagonist dances his way through a pulsing, nocturnal urban landscape, or his recent endeavor Station to[…..]

Considered a prophet of the digital age, video artist Ryan Trecartin transforms contemporary culture’s addiction to the internet and obsession with technological devices into a violently exuberant visual orgy. Watching his work feels like riding a roller coaster into the vertiginous depths of the Web or looking through a kaleidoscope on acid; it is an experience of hysterical nonlinearity, relentless mutation, and extreme visual and verbal cacophony. On March 25,[…..]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Junior year of college, I made a plaster carrying case for my favorite coffee mug. The mug wasn’t mine. At least not legitimately. I’d borrowed it from a guy who ran a Vegan co-op, and loved it too much to give back. It was extra-tall, square-shaped—who has a mug with four corners?—and[…..]

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[…..]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley There’s a video—one of many—that’s been circulating the web since last Friday. It’s called “Tsunami Hitting City of Kamaishi” and it lasts for a grueling four minutes and thirty-eight seconds. The first thirty seconds show a view of the Pacific coast that’s relatively calm, though overcast. Ships float by distantly and you[…..]

Installation view: HOUSE, 2010. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles. It feels like a thousand years, though I know it’s only been about five minutes. Feet balancing atop five-inch heels on the loose gravel floor, my ankles quiver unsteadily as I clench every muscle in my legs to avoid toppling into Jeffrey Deitch’s back. This misstep would surely initiate a domino-like collapse of the well-coiffed[…..]

Lari Pittman is a gardener. Particularly fond of succulents, he maintains precisely manicured rows of cacti that borrow from a methodical landscape sensibility, a rational formation he claims “pushes back” against the chaos of nature. A composite of Columbian and American Southern heritage, Pittman is fluent in the duality of cultivated life. He understands that mortality is the only fixed variable in our otherwise unique[…..]