Art in the Crack of the LAC (MA)

Went to LACMA’s late Night Art event last night. They made very good use of the space between the Ahmanson and BCAM buildings, behind the Urban Light installation—a space I started to call the “crack in the Lac” with my friends. DJs pumping out the German techno and outdoor seating with bar created a very pleasant outdor hangout space. The best part though was behind the projection screen, where some LACMA staff (perhaps education staff? They always have the most fun) were there with art-making supplies for making puppets and photocopies of Franz West’s face for mask-making, and a mini installation of liquor bottles plastered a la Franz West (hidden treasures for sure).

The art was a bit difficult to see due to the crowds, and the readings in the galleries, which sometimes blocked the art from those of us who didn’t want to listen to the spoken word. Franz West was not for me (except as a cut-out puppet I made), but the Art of Two Germanys exhibition was quite impressive. It was huge though, and although the art was a bit depressing, you got the sense of something that must be important. Highlights included some great still photographs of performance events, including artists like Josef Beuys and Nam June Paik; and some monstrous Anselm Kieffer paintings. In one room, a chocolate sculpture by Dieter Roth proved how experiencing art through unexpected sensory information can make you take a second look (see object on left in image below). I had dismissed it on first glance, but then smelled chocolate and had to find the source of the smell. Those little terracotta monkeys are actually chocolate (and lions). One well-placed performance inside the gallery was a musician playing a leaden sounding composition on a double-bass in a room with a glasnost-era oil painting of Ronald Reagan looking skyward, and a red carpet leading away from him across the room.

Gallery installation shot of LACMA’s The Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures.

Elias Sime :: eye of the needle, eye of the heart

Made a quick visit to Santa Monica Museum of Art yesterday to visit a friend who works there and was taken aback by their wonderful exhibition of work by Ethiopian artist Elias Sime. It’s presented like an installation, with stuffed and decorated goat skins, and thrones carved from wood and animal horns arranged around the floor of the room, which they opened up to one big room with the high warehouse ceiling opened up.

Elias Sime at SMMA, image from http://micheleguieu.blogspot.com/

I was reminded of Ethiopia, probably because of the colors and materials. The brown and earthy tenor of the whole room, highlighted with bright colors of plastic and threads within the larger pieces are the colors of Ethiopia, where mud and rocks prevail. The goat skins and thrones, along with mud and straw sculptures of monkeys in one corner, are made from the materials traditionally ised forbuilding traditional tukuls ( before eucalyptus was introduced in the 19th century!). A video in the back room, narrated by an enthusiastic Peter Sellars, gives a great view of the artist’s life within his community in Addis.

Although the goat skins and thrones dominate the room (I love the wooden carved feet emerging from some of the thrones!), the stitched canvas paintings hung on the walls are surreal and impressive in their craftsmanship. The imagery is pure modernism–heroic and masculine, but every line is stitched into the canvas (by hand? I think so.). You get close and you can feel the tenacity required to manually create the broad strokes of color one 1/4-inch stitch at a time.

My favorite part of the installation is video that you can control, taking you through the streets of Addis. They simply attached a camera to a car and drove around. It really gives a sense of this city, which my dad calls an “overgrown village.”

Check out this blog, which has loads of great photos, including Peter Sellars’ gigantic face from one of the the videos.

See some of my own photos from Ethiopia, and read about my travels there by choosing the “Ethiopia” tag on this blog, or visit my Flickr page.

Katie Lewis :: Drawing Room

For Katie Lewis’s first one-gal show, she drapes a room in colorful squiggling lines that emerge from holes in the ceiling, pile up on the floor, and loop along on the baseboards. They are meant to be non-words, cursive letters strung together that evoke thoughts—or perhaps the act of associative thinking, meandering from idea to idea. But they also remind me of sculptural yarn tangled (think Nicola Vruwink), the endless doodles I made in class high school, or the curly electric wires of Christmas lights.

Giant Robot Post-It Show

This is a brilliant idea for an art show: commission a slew of local artists to create little drawings on Post-It notes, stick them to your gallery wall, and charge about $20 for each. It’s Cash-and-Carry–when you buy it, you take it home. It’s a great way to make original works of art affordable, makes a really fun exhibition to explore, encourages the artists to have fun and experiment, and exposes your audience to a whole bunch of new artists all at once! I love it.

On view at the GR2 store/gallery on Sawtelle in West L.A. through January 14. But hurry! They are disappearing fast! They should do this again!

Giant Robot GR2 Post-It Note exhibition

California Video at the Getty

At long last, the exhibition surveying video art in California is here. California Video opens to the public tomorrow.

Curator Glenn Philips made a really great point in the L.A. Weekley today about how contemporary technology (specifically YouTube) has affected how we view video art today:

“The weird thing for me is that I think people will receive this show better now than if I’d done the exact same show 10 years ago. It’s kind of silly, but I honestly think YouTube has something to do with it. We all watch YouTube now and it’s prepared us: People are now comfortable with the idea of someone alone with a camera, turning it on and doing whatever they want to in front of it. That’s really what ’70s video art is. You can theorize about it all you want, you can make as many high-minded claims as you want – and most of the artists that would be applicable to – but they’re really just playing with the camera, and your average museum visitor is now a little more comfortable with that.”

He’s right. It’s amazing to watch the activity online around this exhibition as bloggers each curate their own mini versions of the show, embedding video from YouTube into their online galleries.

Past Exhibitions Archives

Yesterday I drove behind the Orange Curtain to catch the last day of the exhibition Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury at Orange County’s gem of a little art museum, the Orange County Museum of Art.  I was going to write a blog post about the awesome human size of this museum, how wonderful it is to see experimentation in exhibition design and content in a little museum (I watched a clip from Dobie Gillis and Road Runner cartoons!), and what an inspiring snapshot of California history was represented here.

But I went to the OCMA Web site  to find a link to the info about the show and saw something way cool – an archive of *all* of their exhibitions, going back to 1962! Most of the exhibitions are only represented by a title and dates for the show. But it’s there! I was interested to find out that Chris Burden had a 20-year retrospective at OCMA in 1988, and Rico Lebrun had exhibits there in 1999 and 1964 (he painted a mural in a building in the Village Green, a housing experiment from the 1940s, and a national historic landmark here in LA.), and an exhibition in 1978 with the intriguing title The Figure: More or Less. I honestly have never seen this on a museum Web site. Others must be doing it….and more should!

California Video

An exhibition of video art produced in California is coming to the Getty Center in March. It’s going to be super cool.

Watch the trailer!

Close Radio Podcast

The Getty just launched it’s first podcast, The Close Radio Podcast. I think it’s some really awesome material, and I am not just saying that because I slaved away for the past 2 months to help present the material online, and in a podcast.

The material—1970s avant-garde artists performing on the radio—is fascinating. It’s humorous, silly, thought-provoking, bizarre, entertaining (and at times mind-numbingly boring), and challenging in the way that only performance art can be. Close Radio was a radio program on KPFK Los Angeles from 1976-1979. I think it’s awesome that we have this record of L.A. history, and of modern art, and that through modern technology, we can share this archive with anyone who may be interested. More than 36 hours of this stuff is available on getty.edu. The podcast presents a selection of 17 of the broadcasts, presented over the next few months for those who want to listen selectedly and slowly.

I am transported back into 1970s L.A. by listening to this material. I can almost feel my legs sticking to the avocado green vinyl of the backseat of my parents’ 1968 Pontiac Ventura, looking out the window and watching the palm trees glide by, listening to the radio.

1960s Los Angeles: State-based picnics

My parents both moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s from the Midwest. Through family lore and studying bits of California history here and there, I know that this immigration into Southern California was pretty common at that time. I was just speaking to my parents and my dad made a casual comment about how the “Los Angeles Iowa picnic” always had hordes of people attending.

Wait a sec….Iowa picnic? What’s that? My mom chimed in, “oh all the states had picnics back then. I remember hearing about the Minnesota picnic when I first moved here.” This just blows my mind. That there was such an influx of people moving here from other states that they would organize city-wide picnics, based on state affiliation! Woah. I had a million questions….How did you find out about the picnics? Who organized them? Where were they held? Who funded it? My parents couldn’t quite remember the details. My mom thinks she rememebrs ads in the LA Times and that it was just a bunch of locals organizing it. Perhaps they asked for a few dollars to help pay for costs? She mentioned McArthur Park…

There is a history here! Does anyone out there know more? What amazes me most is the state-affiliation, which means there was a very strong sense of identity associated with being from a particular state. And yet, they left! I bet these people were trying to find and build a bit of their local community here in L.A.