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What can I say? I don’t think I ever had any real appreciation for action painting before Friday afternoon. Ushio Shinohara performed/executed his piece, Boxing Painting, at the Getty Center as part of (Rajikaru!) Experimentations in Japanese Art, 1950–1975, a series of programs piggybacking on/associated with Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art at the Getty Research Institute.

I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves, but I really can’t express enough how awesome this performance was. Before the performance, Shinohara gave a long, but not too long, talk about the history of the piece, about his relationship to action painting and about the piece itself. He also mentioned, and this resonated with me because it’s a subject I’ve been thinking about quite a bit, the importance of documentation of the piece. In the research I’ve done since seeing the piece, I’ve gotten the impression that Shinohara is has been very smart about making sure his works get both attention and documentation, something that I think is even more important, and more of a challenge for artists working today.

above - Shirohara’s assistant helps him into his first set of gloves. He used a different glove for each colour.

above - Shirohara has his head shaved into a mowhawk. He’s had his hair ritually shaved into a mowhawk every time he’s performed Boxing Painting.

above - getting dynamic with a jumping uppercut.

above - dipping the gloves in paint. the contact area of the gloves is covered with an absorbent material to soak up the paint.

above - Shinohara bows in triumph after completing the piece. the whole thing took only minutes.

above - the finished piece. This is a stitched photo - any distortion is the result of that process.

Above - a discarded boxing glove

There are more photos in my Getty Center Flickr set. Lots of punching, getting ready and other good stuff!

I went to the Getty yesterday to see Ushio Shinohara perform his Boxing Paining piece (tons of photos of that coming later), and I was on the phone with someone from the Getty and she told me that Yoko Ono had put up a Wish Tree. I was on my way to leave the Getty when I remembered to look for the tree, I found it, and I made my all too obvious wish.

above - others enjoying the tree. A lot of the wishes were anti-war or anti-Bush/Cheney.

above - My original photo of Yoko Ono’s Telephone Piece, as seen at the Berkeley Art Museum.

above - Steve Rhodes’ photo of my photo as seen in Breakthrough: An Amateur Photography Revolution at the San Francisco Fine Arts Commission Gallery. Not only has it been re-contextualized by being cropped to 8″ x 10″ and printed out (the original image was never intended to be viewed on anything other than Flickr), but curator Chuck Mobley has added a “comment” on the piece in two ways. First by including it in this group of photos, titled “Some exhibitions I never got to see but kind of wish I had”, and secondly by adding an actual “comment” below the image ala Flickr, which reads:

Yoko Ono
The phone piece! If you’ve ever been in a room with that phone you can appreciate the monomaniacal focus of this tense and isolating image. Now do yourself a favour and go buy her new record “Yes, I’m a Witch.”

Finally, here’s a photo of Steve’s photo as displayed on my Sony Monitor. Which one of these is art again? Which one is not art?

I know someone who sincerely, honestly believes that anything is art if you say or feel it is. I always felt that sentiment was a cop-out, and I’ve never bought it. I shoot 99% of my pictures for no other purpose than documentation, none of the photos I’ve ever shot has been intended or conceived as art. Did my photo become art because a curator “elevated” its status by putting it on the wall in a gallery? Was it art to begin with, despite my non-art intentions?

I was at the Getty today for a Multicultural Undergraduate Internship program meeting and when I went to leave, they had shut down the tram so that they could do some gardening alongside the tracks.  So I ended up taking a shuttle bus back down to the parking garage.

The shuttle bus trip seemed exciting at first, but then became a somewhat unwelcome peek into the underbelly of the marble clad art fortress.  Something about the many twists and turns (I swear, at one point I think we did a figure eight), combined with the fact that it deposits you far away from the underground parking garage, forcing the shuttle to traverse several blocks of surface streets before entering the garage as a visitor was, broke the illusion of architectural perfection that my previous tram-only experience provided.

This whole tiny experience reminds me of just how important entrances are.  I spend a fair amount of my time in and out of dojos, and the minor rituals of entrance and exit of those spaces are a constant contextualizing agent in my life.  It’s gotten to the point that I place some great symbolic value in the aesthetics and rituals of entrances and exits in other areas of my life as well.  In some way, the silent ascent of the tram from the mundane world of the parking garage to the cloud city illusion of the Getty Center itself mirrors that kind of controlled entrance (to me at least), and the strange and raw exit from the Getty via shuttle sort of violated the rules of my relationship to the place.

Somebody likes me! Last week I received an E-mail letting me know that one of my Flickr photos (a sneaky cam shot of a Yoko Ono Telephone Piece taken on the sly at the Berkeley Museum of Art, seen above) was selected to be in the Breakthrough: An Amateur Photography Revolution show at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery by curator Chuck Mobley. The show is connected with the awesome JPG Magazine, and some of the images in the show will appear in JPG issue 10, as well. All I had to do to participate was sit back and send in a version of the image that met their specs. I didn’t even have to leave my desk. That’s my kind of artistic practice!

I’m really stoked to be selected for the show, since I’m a Flickr evangelist/whore/addict, and I guess it’s a sign that I’m not the world’s worst photographer. I make use of Flickr when looking for new artists, and it’s a great resource for finding and sharing images of all kinds of artwork, as well as just about anything else that can be photographed.

The show opens tomorrow night, in SF, so I won’t be there. I’m hoping someone puts up photos of it on Flickr, so I can see it. Then I can get busy planning my meta-Flickr show of curated photos from Flickr based exhibitions. Or I can sit at my monitor, looking at someone else’s photo of my photo, and take a photo of that and then upload it to Flickr. Just kidding. Seriously, though, I’ve been considering several Flickr oriented exhibition projects for the Center’s upcoming schedule, and I’d be willing to bet that in the next 6 - 18 months, there will be more than a few Flickr based projects showing up in galleries.

Audiophile and 78 RPM record collector Jonathan Ward has started a new blog, Excavated Shellac, devoted to his collection of 78 RPM records.  His collection seems to cover an exhaustive range of musical styles, but his focus is on early ethnographic recordings, with an heavy load of African and Middle Eastern material.  He’s incredibly knowledgeable about his collection - he can give you the backstory on a recording like no one else I know.   There’s three starter posts up now, and he’s going to shoot for one a week.  Enjoy!

I don’t know how this happened - this website has mutated to a “Marshall Writes about Art” project, which, frankly, I’m enjoying.  Someone even sent me a press release last week as if I’m an art-news blog/exhibition listing.

Anyways…

Olga Garay New Head of the DCA in Los Angeles

Olga Garay has been named the new head of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.  I saw this on LA Observed this morning, and I don’t really have an opinion on it. It is proof that the Villaraigosa decided not to make the interim head permanent, which was the word on the street a while back.

There’s nothing in her background that I’ve read that tells me anything substantive about her likelihood to save the ailing department.  A little light googling turns up little, the LA Observed story itself is  the 5th hit on the search, making her appear, at first look, to be a decidedly low profile choice to head the Department of Cultural Affairs for one of the worlds’s biggest cities. Time will tell…

The LA Times also has a blurb about it, also sourced from the press release - no real details yet.

Meditating on Barry Munitz’ Legacy
I think the Getty  is currently displaying some of the best shows since it opened. The decision to support more contemporary projects seems to really be paying off. Most of these projects were cooked up and supported during the Munitz era. Does that mean that Munitz deserves some credit for his managerial skills? Or does that mean that those projects came to be despite his management? I don’t know enough about the hierarchy at the Getty to really have any kind of perspective on his influence, so maybe I’m just spinning my wheels on this one.  Another thought I had was that the Marion True scandal occupied so much time at the top that it created a vacuum of opportunity that the curatorial staff of the Getty took great advantage of. Who knows?

Yeah, he’s the devil, an incompetent, cronyistic boob.   If my study of history has born any fruit, it’s that many of man’s achievements are more the result of accident than intent - could that be the case here?

Last night I attended the final opening at the Brewery Project, A Simple Complex: Redux. John O’Brian has run the Brwwery Project for ten years, and the project’s life has come to it’s end. John ended the project by mirroring the title of the space’s first exhibition, A Simple Complex. For those who don’t know, the Brewery Project has largely been home to exhibitions put together by “Artist Organizers”, a space designed to be home to both experimental works and working methods.

I organized a show (in which I also participated as an artist) at the Project in September of last year, Contemplating Apocalypse. Given that the ten year lifespan of the Brewery largely mirrors the length of my own career as an arts professional, it has a special place in my heart as a point of reference - over the past decade I’ve routinely worked with artists who took part in Brewery Project exhibitions. I first got involved in the arts at a time when Los Angeles was home to a number of largely experimental exhibition spaces (like the Project), which plays a large role in how I envisioned and operated Walled City, and how I have curated/organized Gallery G at AGCC, and now both the Center’s Gallery A and Downstairs Gallery.

On to the art. I really liked what I saw at the Brewery last night. Almost everything contributed to my sadness regarding the closure of the venue. I even felt nostalgic about the super narrow, super steep, knee crushing stairway.

above - Wendy Adest, Laurel - All of Adest’s work is on coloured plexi, which casts a nice glow on the white wall behind. I’m seeing a lot more Plexiglas used in art today, and I’m liking what I’m seeing. I think it’s sort of maturing as an artists material, and moving beyond novelty.

above -Rebecca Ripple, God - This works on so many levels. A really beautiful, whimsical, serious, well crafted object.

above - Daniel Marios, Yardage with Spiders (Orb Weaver) - There were two of these pieces and an accompanying quilt. I don’t think my image of this piece came out as well as I wanted it to. The photo has a great contrast of color, and really solid detail.

above - Christie Frields, Here Today, Gone Tomorrow - One of the things that most attracted me to this piece was the square in cross section bamboo pegs that attach it to the wall. I like unframed works on paper, but there’s always that pesky “how’s it going to stay on the wall” factor. Nice solution that really mirrors the piece itself.

above - Lester Monzon, Vulture - You’ve really gotta zoom in on this baby to see the way that it’s painted, but it has a kind of psychedelic swirl thing going on.

above - John O’Brien, A.W.O.L. (All Works of Leisure) Ensemble, Dust Breathing - I love a good long title almost as much as I love a faux archaeological object. This piece is about 36″ high - that’s one big bell jar.

Damn The Aesthetic for not having direct links to posts. I was cruising the internet at lunch today, visited The Aesthetic, and lo and behold, I’m reminded about an artist who’s work has obsessed me for so long that it’s had slipped from obsession to memory. I’m going to just reprint the whole post here for your linking pleasure, since the links are what it’s all about on this one. Thanks to Garrison for the jolt!

It’s possible that no artist has ever merged art and politics as well as Mark Lombardi. The artist died in 2000, but his work lives on as living testimony that conspiracy can be quite elegant if rendered properly. We originally learned of him in a Punk Planet article reprinted in the Utne Reader. While it’s hard to truly get an idea of his art from images on the web, you can see a little bit of what he was up to here and here. You can also see more on Google. (April 10, 2007)

I encountered Lombardi’s work a few years ago during a visit to the YBCA in San Francisco. I had gone up to take a peek at Bang the Machine, their video game oriented show (which was a bit of a muddle, but had some solid work in it, along with some total crap.) , and I discovered his work in the upstairs hallways. Mark Lombardi’s work is to me, like an album so good you want to cover the whole thing, anyone who’s ever been in a band knows that feeling. You wish you had done it yourself - you know that it’s the work that some tiny part of you inside could do, and you’ll forever reference and to some degree emulate it. I think it was my encounter with Lombardi’s work that made me know (not just realize) that diagrams can be art, and I owe him a big debt. I don’t think I would have been able to do of my Avian Flu work had I not seen his show.

Presuming that someone other than my oh-so-proud Jewish mother reads this thing.

Edith Abeyta has gotten herself onto a plane and flown away for a three month residency in the Netherlands, where she, working with her husband Bob Tower, will be realizing her Something’s Brewing project. She’s got a brand new website at Edithabeyta.net, and is already sending back the word on her giant room at the Hotel Mariakapel (that’s gotta be one of the weirdest web designs I’ve seen since the Wild West days of the mid 90’s), and the fun time to be had when buying shampoo and conditioner when you can’t read Dutch. I know that Edith’s going to cook up something unexpected and wonderful in the next few months, so keep an eye out for future missives from the Netherlands.