Hardcore Brancusi

From "Twice Upon a Time," Benjamin Valenza, at Art Since '69

Inspiration for my own Brancusi homage. Carving out walls, perhaps, to simulate a Brancusi as projected on a non-flat plane.

But I Look Good

"I Can't Hear, I Can't See," (2010) by Yvonne Rainer

Rodarte

Fall/Winter 10/11

WDR is a huge fan of the Mulleavy sisters’ work. We appreciate the deconstructed, yet always impeccably-formed, unmonumental aesthetic they’ve cultivated that remains their focus. Women sleepwalking to work in Juarez, Texas inspired this collection—dressing in the dark. WDR often dresses in the dark, to revolutionary effect (scarves as sarong-like skirts, e.g.).

Surface Texture

"Vengeful," (2010) by ID of Well Dressed Refugees

Checkout

Cathy Wilkes, "I give you all my money," 2007. Installation view.

Mannequins, Smithson references, and medicalized consumption. This piece evokes the anesthesic feeling of walking through a shopping mall, that deadening feeling that can only be alleviated by reflecting yourself into objects. Shopping is a substitute activity.

Americanon

Some excerpts from our offshoot ConcepTwitter, operating under the pseudonym/”art world character” Paúl de Soto:

The Soul at Work

• “I’m with my body, not in it,” (2010) 21-day hypergraphic documentation (text and photo) of what I ingest, exercise routines, emotions, etc.
• “Desire,” (In Progress) tearing through a number of neo-Expressionist canvas works–the word “desire” superimposed on each–with a machete.
• “Running out of energy,” (2010) 14-day performance, scrawling, “there is something but it is not the same anymore,” repeatedly on furniture.
• “After On Kawara,” (Ongoing) daily postcard correspondence between LA and Miami, “I fell asleep at __:__ last night.”
• “Any Number of Things at Once, all Contradictory,” (2010) labanotated dance performed in the background of an 18-person dinner party onstage
• “I Forgot to Tell You,” (2010 – ) Conceptual project: move to Topeka, Kansas, marry a grocery clerk, have a baby, be an admin. assistant.
• “What to eat, How to get it,” (2010) video installation of a small blond girl sitting on her couch, cross-legged, thinking about what to eat
• “Cosmeticize my Mind,” (2010) archival film of ECT patients from 1960s-now projected on four walls, physically altered to visually degrade.

We are in the process of putting together a catalog, or manual, of 22 of these projects. Stay tuned!

Ambassador Auditorium

WDR hung out in a complex that used to be an opera house, the “Carnegie Hall of the West,” this past week. A Preview:

Armstrongism

It also used to be owned and operated by a cult! Text forthcoming on its genealogy.

Utopian Body

Still from Yvonne Rainer's "Trio A" (1966)

Los Refugiados Elegantes came across a never-before published translation of a radio broadcast that Foucault gave in 1966, titled, “Le corps utopique.” Here, he shuns myth in lieu of the body as the place where utopia is situated, which we think is consonant with his body of work as a whole. A choice quotation that ends the essay, which we saps are holding onto:

Maybe it should also be said that to make love is to feel one’s body close in on oneself. It is finally to exist outside of any utopia, with all of one’s density, between the hands of the other. Under the other’s fingers running over you, all the invisible parts of your body begin to exist. Against the lips of the other, yours become sensitive. In front of his half-closed eyes, your face acquires a certitude. There is a gaze, finally, to see your closed eyelids. Love also, like the mirror and like death–it appeases the utopia of your body, it hushes it, it calms it, it encloses it as if in a box, it shuts and seals it. This is why love is so closely related to the illusion of the mirror and the menace of death. And if, despite these two perilous figures that surround it, we love so much to make love, it is because, in love, the body is here.

Walter Hopps

Walter Hopps, from Kristine McKenna's "The Ferus Gallery: A Place to Begin"

Excerpt from X-TRA’s recent feature on late Los Angeles curator Hopps:

According to Hopps himself, he attempted to carve out a unique position within the tradition of curators and “museum men” from the beginning of his career at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon) in the early 1960s. As he told an interviewer in 1987, “even in the Pasadena days, as I got to know Michael Fried, he would curse me, saying, ‘You just aren’t part of the profession at all. You’re a damned anthropologist.’ And I would say, ‘You’re damned right I am.’
…
But Fried’s comment also gets at a part of Hopps’ character, which grew out of his education in the sciences. Born into a family of physicians, he was home-tutored before attending the Polytechnic School in Pasadena and Eagle Rock High School, where he excelled at math and science. In 1950, he enrolled at Stanford, but left shortly thereafter to study microbiology at UCLA. His aptitude in the sciences did not limit his curiosity about the arts, however, and it was during a high school trip to see the best collection of modern art in the area, at the home of Walter and Louise Arensberg in Hollywood, that his interest was seriously piqued…As Hopps would later demonstrate when he mounted the show he was most noted for, the first career retrospective of Marcel Duchamp at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963, the sense of an exhibit as a finely-tuned experiment, as an occasion in which bring together sensitive visual material and then to observe the interaction between art objects, ideas, artists and the public, was central to Hopps’ approach.

Jejune

How I would arrange and totalize the detritus of Saturday into a site-specific installation in three parts:

"Number 1," (2010)

1. Situated on a freeway: fog, the Pacific ocean (sounding through tall, industrial loudspeakers), (images of) Barack Obama (with “Everyday” text subtitled, projected on a drive-in screen, the images that are juxtaposed with) hundreds of text messages, apathetic youth (sitting, watching this, sending in those texts to be interspersed in the steady stream of Presidential images, some of the text messages which quote) SAT passages on poverty, (the youth dine on fast-food breakfast, discarding) crumpled McDonald’s wrappers and bags, (which) disgruntled bagel shop workers (each clean up, leaving traces of) prosciutto (and) samosas (in their wake), a sleepy basset hound (sits atop a cop car, which is blockading for the installation itself, as) “Road Construction, 2 Left Lanes Closed” (a CalTrans sign flickering with this text).

"Number 2, after Brian O'Doherty" (2010)

2. In a plain white gallery space: (three video screens showing footage of A. a continuous screenshot of a conversation taking place on) Google Chat (that interrogates) Michel Foucault’s “Utopian Body” (and its relation to our use of) Google Technology (and second) disgruntled gay men, (and B. a single-shot film of a Korean woman who goes shopping at a) Korean grocery store (during peak hours in) Sawtelle, (then to get her hair cut at an) upscale salon, (then to a Yogurtland to eat) frozen yogurt in 5 flavors, (then) buying a Caucasian teenager two Olde English 40s, (then sitting) in traffic (in her German car, looking bored, finally ending up at a gymnasium with a) rooftop pool (in) Koreatown, (where she takes a dip, the film ending as she does freestyle laps, then looping, and C.) Lifetime movie starring the redhead from “Desperate Housewives.”

"Number 3," (2010)

3. In a museum: attractive, tan gay men (in) “a sliding-glass vitrine like an art installation,” (exercising on) treadmills, chest presses, (one showering behind a glass enclosure, revealing a) cubist buttocks, (on the glass are two large high-resolution projections that blur their image, one a panorama shot of) the LA basin (taken from) Western Avenue as it descends driving northward, (and two of) 30-60-90 triangles.