Over at Huffington Post, ARTINFO has a fun breakdown of Glenn Beck’s four “most outstanding moments” as an “art critic”. I fell in love with Beck, as a kind of “straight man to David Icke” while in a dentist’s chair once, and I for one would love to hear him opine more about art, at such great length that all sense unravels from his spiel. Or even more awesome, a show co-hosted by Glenn Beck and Sister Wendy that comes with an optional Ambien and Percocet subscription. If I could come home to that mindwiper at the end of my day…
In the past day or so, The Getty has been uploading a host of short, narrated overviews of objects in its collection to its YouTube account. Some of them, like Titian’s Portrait of Alfonso d’ Avalon, Marquis of Vasto, in Armour with a Page, one of my favourite paintings in their collection, is so freshly uploaded that it isn’t labeled properly yet. Most seem about 1:30 long, and the speakers are clear and have interesting insights into the history of the objects. I’m not sure if it’s the same narration as one would experience on an audio tour, as I’ve never used one of those, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the case. Regardless, they will tickle your love for some amazing paintings. Below, more Titian, the Penitent Magdelene.
I used to hate fire extinguisher graffiti but then I realized the purity of it, the ejaculatory, infantile, primeval joy of it, and now I like it even more. There’s an inevitability in Katsu’sMOCA piece, that his tag is speaking for a lot of other writers and graffiti lovers here. Someone get that man a crown. Via 12ozProphet, who has more pictures of the piece in progress and completed. According to 12oz, MOCA wants to buff it and some of the Art in the Street artists are trying to get it to stay.
In which Kobe Bryant uses his driving and ball handling skills to top a man stealing what’s probably the world’s most worthless, cheap giclee on canvas painting. Interpol would be proud. Watch out Kareem and Wilt, Kobe’s gonna be the next Laker to trade in his rings for silver screen glory.
Don’t you just love that teardrop/tennis racket case shape on the front wheel? It makes me think of a Claes Oldenberg soft sculpture, gives me that loose gravity, dreamy feeling. Olek was in LA recently for a show at the Pacific Design Center (where I met her or one of her minions wearing an unbelievable, head-to-toe, camouflage, crochet body suit while I was clad in a cheap Star Trek uniform), and graced the streets with the above adorable bike.
You know you’ve lived in a port town for too long when you’re more into the container ships in an illustration than the charming, sexy ladies. I digress… Electric Pick is a tattoo magician, and he’s been sharing some of his travel journals on his blog, The Electric Plog. Based on his travels on globetrotting container ships, the illustrations accompanying Pick’s journal entries drip with the slow, mysterious energy of the sea and give me a serious case of travel envy.
I recently came across Gerry Judah’s work on BLDGBLOG, and it’s nuts, totally gonzo hot painting/installation/sculpture. These bleached and skeletal cityscape derived works arouse so much end time emotion in me, the “empty world/after man” feeling. I want to be near one to see if the dead time smell of abandoned buildings and dry storm drains wafts from them. They make me hear the wind from hydrogen bombs and the nothing sound of unnamed cities half buried in sand.
My visit to LACMA during Spring Break! Woo! Woo! 2011! was particularly fruitful. The stars aligned and I kept hitting high notes over and over again. Anyways…
The piece above is John Outterbridge’s John Ivery’s Truck: Hauling Away the Traps and Saving the Yams. If my memory serves, it may be one of the first pieces of art I professionally handled, back at El Camino College Art Gallery, in 1996 or 1997. I had just started studying Gallery Management with Michael Lewis Miller, right on time to spend three weeks working alongside John during the installation of a solo show of his work. John and I hit it off pretty well, and I listened in total awe as we moved dirt, wood, yams and lye soap around the gallery, constructing an installation like a metaphorical fire pit, the center of human exchange in the elemental darkness. There were so many yams and so much dirt and it all needed to be just right and I was ecstatic to labour on John’s vision. John is a storyteller, and he impressed upon me heavily his distrust for the objective and his love for the reality of a good story, the human truths. To this day, I routinely think of John’s small wisdoms that he related to me while we worked in the rich smell of his earthy materials. I remember how his narrative stretched from army life to his distaste for alcohol to UFO’s on country roads, that his mind was free, energetic and always roaming.
What I remember about the piece above (or its near doppleganger) is that there were several like it, one with silver wheels made from the shades of modernist lamps that John had scrounged from someone’s curbside garbage, and that they came out of shiny, custom-made, aluminum travel cases, made to transport John’s work to the 1994 Rio Biennial. John was particularly proud of the cases, as if they represented another rung in his long climb to artistic prominence and recognition, the trappings of an established artist. They also represented a savvy and renewable use of the budget for the Rio project, something that also resonates with me to this day. Inside the cases, custom cut foam allowed the trucks and cars to be slid out with the utmost of care. My hands in tight cotton gloves, in the trust of a threesome or foursome of preparators, sliding the trucks out of the tightly cut foam remains my ur-memory as an installer and preparator.
Looking back, I can see a lot of my curatorial and artistic practice growing out of my early exhibition experiences working with John and people like him. My commitment to installation and site-specific projects, a trust that artists can propose unseen and untested works and that they will be successful, the importance of history and narrative, my distaste for academic exercise in artmaking, and much, much more…
And that’s just the approach to the conclusion of the interview. I think this is actually one of his more focused interviews/rants, and his general notions are more clear/less distracted here than anywhere else I can think of. There’s a whole performance after the interview… Jonathan Messe is a spellcaster, a contemporary art conjurer and he should be cloned into an army of elementary school civics teachers, their pedagogy dial with “mutate!” set to 11. He should be an airborne virus, not a person. For best results, play all videos simultaneously or don’t even play them and just imagine them while walking in a field of black roses. It’s your choice.
