L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Artist Craig Kauffman had been living in Europe and was on his way home to L.A. in the early 1960s when he stopped in New York and saw the work of former friend and neighbor, Billy Al Bengston, on view at Martha Jackson Gallery. Bengston, one of L.A. cool motorcycle-savvy surfer artists[…..]
The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is engaged in a dangerous experiment, and it is not the levitation of a twenty-ton piece of Richard Serra’s steel sculpture, Sequence, 2006, thirty feet into the air. Nor is it the gyration of a 200-foot tall crane lifting the first of twelve panels—each almost thirteen-feet high and between thirty- and forty-feet long—from a flatbed trailer onto a[…..]
All of Aideen Barry’s work exists in a very fragile balance: a woman performs domestic tasks while levitating; a sculpture promises both the control of cleanliness and the chaos of an explosion; women in flowing red dresses dance on water in giant floating plastic balls, all the while falling comically—and using up the oxygen in the sealed sphere. At each viewing of her work I,[…..]
As an exhibition of contemporary Puerto Rican artists, one might be tempted to hypothesize that Paraíso, on view this month at ltd los angeles, is meant to express a quintessentially Puerto Rican attitude, or perhaps act as homage to the land itself. What’s primarily on display, however, is a state of mind: one shared by quite a few 21st-century contemporary artists, regardless of nationality. In[…..]
Over a lifetime of visiting museums, you learn that all souvenirs have a price point, from the dollar-fifty commemorative postcard to the pieces in the collection itself. These prized mementos, selected, brought home, catalogued and displayed, represent the collector’s forays to classical or far-flung sites. My favorite disruption to this cycle is a hall of life-sized plaster casts of classical Greek and Roman architecture at[…..]
There is a well-worn narrative of twentieth century painting that goes like this: From Cezanne to Picasso to Pollock, the illusionistic space of painting flattened more and more until the picture plane and the surface created by the paint itself became the primary subject matter, eliminating images altogether in favor of abstraction. While this teleology has some merit, the purity of the story is incomplete.[…..]
The figures in Dutch artist Folkert de Jong’s work are both historical totems and cautionary tales. Suggesting that our darkest impulses are unavoidably cyclical in nature, he evades didactics through a combination of period details and contemporary imagery. de Jong seems to understand that every nationalistic conquest brings with it trumpet bleats, shiny shoes and other supposed finery—things that, while often treated as symbols of[…..]
