"Tom Waits narrates this whimsical, fast-moving introduction to the life and work of West-Coast conceptual artist John Baldessari. The film was directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the creative team behind Catfish and Paranormal Activity 3. It was made for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s inaugural Art & Film Gala, held last November in honor of Baldessari and Clint Eastwood. Baldessari mixes a variety of media in his art, including sculpture, painting, printmaking and video. “His work,” writes Elisabeth Roark of Grove Art Online, “is characterized by a consciousness of language evident in his use of puns, semantics based on the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and by the incorporation of material drawn from popular culture.” When Joost and Schulman ask Baldessari how he will be remembered 100 years hence, he says dryly, “I’m the guy who puts dots over people’s faces.”"

"Jayson Scott Musson is a gorilla in a tie. If he’s not wasting hours upon hours re-watching the cantina shoot-out between Han Solo and Greedo as if it were the Zapruder film, then Jayson Scott Musson is sleeping. If he’s not sleeping then he’s eating. Once he’s done eating, he then takes a small hike into the forest where he digs a hole into the earth so he can have sex with the planet. “I’m trying to make a golem like a Hebrew wizard.” Mr. Musson declares as his reason for this violation of Mother Earth’s sacrosanctity. This is the closest Mr. Musson will ever come in being either a scientist or a father."

"To be blunt, Portland's art scene has a lot of no-no on its lips but yes-yes in its eyes. Storm Tharp, one of Portland's bigger stars who sports that regional artist's badge of honor, inclusion in a Whitney Biennial, has said, "If it becomes an art capital, I might have to move back to the Snake River." He'll probably have to call for the moving van sooner than expected. Portland might be, as Mr. Jahn puts it, "a lot of soggy people drinking a lot of coffee," but you can feel it in the drizzly air: It's livable, lefty and crammed with those unpolished launching pads known as alternative spaces. For the foreseeable future, anyway, artists will keep heading to Portland."

"Dissanayake posed that question boldly in her first book: "Since all human societies, past and present, so far as we know, make and respond to art, it must contribute something essential to human life. But what?" A biologist, she proposed, would consider art a set of behaviors rather than a class of objects. Dissanayake was more interested in sculpting than in marble statues and even more intrigued by dynamic arts like singing and dancing. She reasoned that if natural selection had shaped these behaviors—as it had shaped every other functional aspect of human design—then the behaviors must result from predispositions that gave hominids an advantage over their competitors as they evolved. What was that advantage? Dissanayake has looked for it in children's play, premodern ritual, and mother-infant attachment. There is no consensus among evolutionary psychologists that she has discovered the definitive answer. But there is a widespread belief that she has found the right way to ask the question."

"The universe is real but you can’t see it. You have to imagine it. Once you imagine it, you can be realistic about reproducing it."

"Stop doing all those drugs. Get some sleep. At least sometimes. It is good for you. Figure out your voice. I know that is what everyone is trying to do, but don’t let other voices convolute your own voice.

"But I wouldn’t want to give a student too much advice. Part of it is that they have to figure it out themselves."

"Jerry Saltz picks 10 artists to save the art world. He's wrong of course because he didn't pick any Portlanders... we are the "Capital of Conscience" as I penned in the Tribune's Op Ed a few months ago after all. So if I picked 10 Portlanders (who haven't already been in a Whitney Biennial) who would they be? I won't make too big a deal about this list but just off the top of my head these 10 are all ready and doing original, high level work with impressively sustained intelligence."

"There's a little moment that's very intense. And as it comes up into the light of day, it expands-because it's been living down deep in my mind under all this pressure. It starts to bob to the surface and it finally becomes filled with all sorts of details. Finally, I see the whole scene, complete with characters."

"In the center is this outrageous sofa by Gaetano Pesce, which is a fusion of a salmon, a bear and a toucan. I was furnishing with Spanish Revival furniture, but I was getting bored."

"Late in his life, Claude Monet developed cataracts. As his lenses degraded, they blocked parts of the visible spectrum, and the colors he perceived grew muddy. Monet's cataracts left him struggling to paint; he complained to friends that he felt as if he saw everything in a fog. After years of failed treatments, he agreed at age 82 to have the lens of his left eye completely removed. Light could now stream through the opening unimpeded. Monet could now see familiar colors again. And he could also see colors he had never seen before. Monet began to see--and to paint--in ultraviolet."

"Herein lie the beginnings of controversy. When McQueen contacted the Ministry of Defence for the addresses of the families of the 1 15 soldiers who had died thus far in the conflict, the agency refused to help. "The second-in-command there is also on the board of the Imperial War Museum," the artist recalls, "and he suggested I do a landscape instead." The museum was similarly disinclined to support his cause, and the Royal Mail rejected his proposal. Stonewalled by the establishment, McQueen went forward without official help, encouraged by Alex Poots, the director of the Manchester International Festival--who said that he would gladly display the project at this cross-media event devoted entirely to newly commissioned work. Poots helped McQueen hire a researcher to assist in locating and contacting the families of fallen soldiers--the vast majority of whom sent photographs (ninety-eight agreed to participate and only four refused outright; the others did not respond)--and the artist made his own samizdat run of stamps."

"McQueen told me that he tends to be sparked by technical problems, and Bear is in part a demonstration of how to involve both camera and viewer in the action. But it also, he added, has emotional motives, exploring, if at a certain distance, both a friend's suicide and the artist's relationship with his father. The film's protagonists, one of them McQueen, are both black, but issues of race, he has said, are not a priority in his work."

"This insistence that machines don’t care and won’t care about what we see, or about what seeing certain things does to us as organisms, is a deep—and I think deeply productive—problem for the New Aesthetic. There’s a yearning, a beseeching in our relation to machines, and I can’t help thinking we’ll find ourselves spurned, or cuckolded, or worse in the end. Learning to see through machines is not the same thing as learning to see as machines."

"...we’ve asked a few of our tech art friends to weigh in on the New Aesthetic and Sterling’s assessment."

"For a while now, I’ve been collecting images and things that seem to approach a new aesthetic of the future, which sounds more portentous than I mean. What I mean is that we’ve got frustrated with the NASA extropianism space-future, the failure of jetpacks, and we need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder. Consider this a mood-board for unknown products."

"One of the core themes of the New Aesthetic has been our collaboration with technology, whether that’s bots, digital cameras or satellites (and whether that collaboration is conscious or unconscious), and a useful visual shorthand for that collaboration has been glitchy and pixelated imagery, a way of seeing that seems to reveal a blurring between “the real” and “the digital”, the physical and the virtual, the human and the machine. It should also be clear that this ‘look’ is a metaphor for understanding and communicating the experience of a world in which the New Aesthetic is increasingly pervasive."

"So the talk became “Waving at the machines”, a 50-minute, 120-slide vector through the idea, an idea that still seems massive and nebulous, but which it is possible to fire a laser through and illuminate some motes. I’m not sure I managed to phrase the camouflage stuff quite right, and the need for an ending always feels like a cop-out, but nevertheless, I cover many of the bases. (Web Directions have also transcribed the entire talk, should you be so crazy as to attempt to read it.)"

"The INS rejects the Enlightenment’s version of time: of time as progress, a line growing stronger and clearer as it runs from past to future. This version is tied into a narrative of transcendence: in the Hegelian system, of Aufhebung, in which thought and matter ascend to the realm of spirit as the projects of philosophy and art perfect themselves. Against this totalizing (we would say, totalitarian) idealist vision, we pit counter-Hegelians like Georges Bataille, who inverts this upward movement, miring spirit in the trough of base materialism. Or Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who, hearing the moronic poet Russel claim that “art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences,” pictures Platonists crawling through Blake’s buttocks to eternity, and silently retorts: “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”"

"This is one of those moments when the art world sidles over toward a visual technology and tries to get all metaphysical. This is the attempted imposition on the public of a new way of perceiving reality. These things occur. They often take a while to blossom. Sometimes they’re as big and loud as Cubism, sometimes they perish like desert roses mostly unseen. But they always happen for good and sufficient reasons. Our own day has those good and sufficient reasons."

"Featuring approximately one hundred works, this exhibition explores Picasso’s creative process through the medium of printmaking, tracing his development from the early years of the twentieth century, with depictions of itinerant circus performers in the Blue and Rose periods, to his discovery of Cubism. It follows his evolving artistic vision through decades of experimentation in etching, lithography, and linoleum cut, demonstrating how each technique inspired new directions in his work. The exhibition focuses on specific themes, showing how Picasso’s imagery went through a constant process of metamorphosis. Printmaking, in particular, allows this fundamental aspect of his art to become vividly clear, since various stages in building a composition can be documented. One series of lithographs shows Picasso progressing, step-by-step, from a realistic depiction of a bull to one that is completely abstracted into schematic lines. Other series reveal changing interpretations of the women in Picasso’s life, as they become the subject of his art and a catalytic force behind his creativity."

"Photographer Alex Prager’s high-intensity L.A. melodrama."

"Is it really the role of an artist who is still active to talk about his own motivations? As a source, he is suspect. With a view to an ‘endangered’ future, it is probably preferable that art critics, in particular, should be mistaken.
"

– Marcel Broodthaers, 1975

"The last artwork of great artists."

"Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece."

"Bruce Guenther curated the present show of Mark Rothko at the Portland Art Museum. We talk about this show, Rothko's history and his place in Modern art."

"Bancroft’s exceptional exhibition makes a strong case for Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park work as the apex of 20th-century abstract painting practice. It confirms our idea of Diebenkorn as the greatest painter of his period, the second-generation abex-and-forward era, and suggests that the Ocean Park paintings are the apex of modern abstract art. "

"I went through a difficult breakup and was extremely lonely. I posted a flyer in NYC that said, "Call me. (347) 469-3173". People took pictures of my flyer and put it on the net. I've received over 60,000 calls and texts. Met amazing people all over the world. People say to me all the time, "So you're not lonely anymore?" I am less lonely. This crazy idea actually worked. This blog consists of some of these conversations."

"IN 1992, when Rineke Dijkstra was an unknown photographer from the Netherlands visiting the United States, she found herself shooting pictures on a beach in South Carolina while being watched intently by an extroverted 14-year-old blond girl."

"Prior to 1994, if you mentioned the name Destroy All Monsters to punk aficionados, it conjured only a minor footnote: a band in Michigan rock music history known for the participation of the former Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton and the MC5 bassist Michael Davis. But by the time its first single, “Bored,” was released in 1978, three of the band’s four original members had left; two of them, Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, had headed west to attend graduate school at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles."

"I can’t pretend to know what’s going on under the hood, but Fluid Simulation with Turing Patterns is a relaxing way to bend your mind for the next 30 seconds. Fire up your favorite Grateful Dead track, double click anywhere to get rid of the text overlay, and then start moving your mouse. Trippy. Click here to see it in action. (Note: Requires Web GL. Simple instructions on how to install it for Safari.)"

"When you do the flip-flop, you achieve effects that aren’t possible when you dwell in only one world, physical or digital. You also achieve effects that are less predictable. Weird things happen on the walls between worlds."

This six-part series examines abstract art over a period of fifty years, beginning with a crucial juncture in modern art in the mid-1950s, and builds a compelling argument for a history and evaluation of late twentieth-century art that challenges the distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, minimalism and pop. The accompanying publication, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops.

James Lavadour paints abstract landscapes. Following parallels with the properties of the natural world, earth and geology with that of paint and the layering or removal of paint, Lavadour's work reflects his deep relationship to the earth and landscape of eastern Oregon and at the same time his continuous curiosity with the painting process.

“What amazed me was how fast and effortless it all seemed. The approach to his work is so internalized that Retna doesn’t have to agonize, and thinking, what do I do next? He just starts in the upper left corner and moves across a surface. The only other artist that I know who was able to do that was Keith Haring. The vocabulary was just so internalized. I compare it to a great jazz musician as well, who improvises within a framework. Having a composition in mind, he starts with just one note, and shaping it as they form an aesthetic structure developed over years of practice. Retna is able to do that from an artistic visual point of view, improvising quickly, and flowing through.

“This year’s Biennial enchants—albeit darkly, in some cases,” writes Peter Schjeldahl, in his review of the 2012 Whitney Biennial. In this audio slide show, Schjeldahl describes the exhibition and analyzes a selection of its works, including one of his favorites, a series of paintings by Nicole Eisenmann.

Artists Christopher Gideon and Elissa Goldstone live and work miles apart. Yet, they love the same game. The two sat down to discuss baseball and its role within the stadium of contemporary art.

Markus Rothkowitz as he was first known was a driven, intense young man who worked hard selling newspapers beneath the Burnside bridge while cutting his intellectual teeth amongst Portland's Jewish community from age 10-18. He wrote forcefully for workers rights for the school paper at Lincoln High School (Now Shattuck Hall at Portland State University) and was even an advocate for women's rights to contraception. Rothko was above all else a humanist, driven by morals and superego more than the egotistical aim of being a great painter.

The 2012 Whitney Biennial is a quiet, incomplete manifesto. It reimagines what a biennial is and explores the ways artists are taking matters into their own hands, resetting the agenda, and fighting back against an art world that had been focused on selling, buzz, and bigness. We’re all still in shock from the ways in which the aesthetic conversation was kidnapped; this show tries to move on. It is about artists probing for ways around irony and cynicism without falling prey to sentimentality, oversimplification, or regression.

Los Angeles Review of Books Podcast #4: Maggie Nelson and Arne de Boever.

Artist Robert Rauschenberg and author and critic Dave Hickey spend an afternoon together reflecting on the artist’s tremendous influence on art and culture since the 1950s. As a conversational instigation Hickey posed the following: Imagine the world without artist Robert Rauschenberg, “Who, in his absence, will work that woozy territory between painting, dance, sculpture, theater, drawing, music, printmaking, assemblage, and design? Who will chart the space between art and life…?”

How can we tell where one wave ends and another begins? I’ve spent hours staring at water, both in the open ocean and in rivers around the world, trying to isolate its movement—how it swells, forms a discernible shape, and then fades out into another form. Like the motion of schools of fish or murmurations of starlings, these forms show the connection between organic and inorganic natural systems, no matter how dissimilar. Making these affinities visible is of great concern to me—for example, to speak of a river system as a singular body or to reveal the topography below the water’s surface. We are less inclined to pollute the things we are able to see.

Richard Serra in conversation with exhibition co-curator Gary Garrels, Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, SFMOMA, on October 13, 2011.

Curator Michael Auping discusses the symbolism of the hooded figures in paintings by Philip Guston.

Artist Philip Guston discusses his paintings while at work in his studio.

“At its core, fear is an emotional mechanism that increases survival chances by motivating fight, flight, or freezing responses to threatening situations,” they write. “Fear seizes one’s attention, halts current plans, and increases vigilance.”
As they point out, this dynamic is echoed in Burke’s description of the experience of the sublime, which the philosopher called “that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended.”

When an attractive woman looks at a great painting, or heralds a great novel, or holds her hands in tween prayer doing that little happy bounce of excitement in the front row of a show at the first chord she recognizes, a million young boys with no chance will know what they want to do with their lives.

Art critics, museum curators, private gallerists and major institutions all promoted Kelley’s work for the way they thought it anatomised (by dissecting and rewiring pop cultural detritus) the uptight schizophrenia that reigned in America’s public, private and domestic spheres (an aesthetic which reinforced their own delusions of panoptican superiority because in their eyes it articulated a process which they thought they were above and beyond). That’s the macro view. At a much lower level, he was a symbol for all that could, and usually does, go wrong whenever the visual art world moves in on rock ‘n’ roll.

Sherman’s art is that of someone saving her own life in a mostly male art world, working from deep instinct, ferocious imagination, assertion, self-defense, all while fashioning an elaborate tapestry of grand visors, demon clowns, Beau Brummels, and Valkyries; frazzled club girls, crinolined courtesans, dandies, macaronis, hippie chicks in Hiawatha fringe, Hollywood housewives, and other women fighting for their places in the world. Sherman is a warrior artist—one who has won her battles so decisively that I can’t imagine anyone ever again embarking on a lifetime of self-portraiture without coming up against her.

No possible set of notes can explain our paintings. Their explanation must come out of a consummated experience between picture and onlooker. The appreciation of art is a true marriage of minds. And in art, as in marriage, lack of consummation is ground for annulment.

"(I spent my) youth in front of the endless space of the landscape of Oregon lying covered by wintery snows, in front of the monumental emptiness that is nothingness and at the same time part of it 'all.'" Mark Rothko

In 1959, a clique of New York artists tried to crack their whole world open. Abstract Expressionism was beginning to feel played out, and they were constantly thinking about what would come after that. This group, which had coalesced around an artist and Rutgers professor named Allan Kaprow, started to wonder about taking the painting out of “action painting”—to try doing what Jackson Pollock had done, but without a canvas. They were asking basic questions: why an artist’s actions must be in service to a physical thing; why poetry, music, and theater were such separate worlds; and why the studio and everything that happened in it (whether wild or banal) couldn’t be fodder.

Stories online aren’t really stories right now. They’re like fragmentary reactions to things for the most part. They’re like little nerve firings. Very rarely are they fully formed thoughts and expressions and so on. So, I think creating a space that’s more about slowing down and contemplating and being introspective is a prerequisite for getting people to tell stories that have impact. When you design a space that encourages short, reactionary verse, people are going to give you short, reactionary verse. Maybe when you design a space that’s not encouraging that, people will use more depth in their self-expression.

at the time, i figured he was just trying to push my buttons and steer the conversation somewhere else, but in the end, his comment began to weigh on me, and i realized he was, once again, trying to get me to realize that a certain kind of preciousness can be dangerous, debilitating, and growth stunting... a very important lesson that enabled the work to move forward... and i have no doubt that there is a large group of former students who are now better artists for having worked with him.

Not many artists count as a game-changer for art. Mike Kelley did. His work altered the international conversation about art, and it changed the Los Angeles art world. His death Tuesday at 57 is an unspeakable loss.

Like a haunted Sol Le Witt, Kelley excelled at inventing systems and finding artistic syntaxes to create his work. He made large felt paintings based on collegiate banners; created hangings from help-wanted and singles ads on church and coffee-shop bulletin boards. For the 1991 Carnegie International, he created a huge room-filling taxonomy of found stuffed dolls and figures laid out like scientific specimens on large folding tables. This Frankenstein's laboratory grew out of his 1987 masterpiece of love, abjection, desire, need, wastefulness, and redemption, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid. This wall piece resembles a three-dimensional de Kooning seen from afar; up close, we see that it's composed entirely of stuffed animals and found afghans, mounted on canvas. In this one work Kelley does a dervish dance in Rauschenberg's famed gap between art and life, creating an abstract composition transmuting the emotions poured into these objects by their many former owners into a new language that, like art itself, exists on the edge beyond words, in an uncanny archaic place well within the realms of ancient and current strangeness. Mike Kelley was a giant.

Miyamura establishes himself as a solo artist with a series of tranquil prints that harken back to the glorious days of the abstract expressionists

MAYOR Richard M. Daley has declared it Keith Haring Week in Chicago. The artist is here to work with some 300 public-high-school kids on a mural, and Daley has issued an official proclamation with lots of official-sounding whereases. For example: "Whereas Keith Haring is internationally recognized as one of the most important artists of his generation and is acknowledged to have popularized and expanded the audience for the art forms of painting and sculpture." Or this one, Haring's favorite: "Whereas he is respected for committing his life and work to the democratic ideals of social justice, equality and compassion for his fellow man."

Established in 1998, GOSS183::CASA MENENDEZ (formerly known as Menendez Publishing) and founded by Didi Menendez publishes poetry books and the literary journals OCHO, MiPOesias Magazine, plus Poets and Artists, which also features visual works by contemporary artists. Poems that have first appeared in OCHO and MiPOesias have been included in the anthologies of the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. Menendez is also the creator of miPOradio, (“where poetry tunes in”).

A mysterious band of hacker-artists is prowling the network of tunnels below Paris,
secretly refurbishing the city's neglected treasures.

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

She blurred the borders between geometry, order, chaos, the body, atmosphere, and ground. She shunned the overemotional hysteria of Abstract Expressionism, pouring thinned, watered down, and turpentine-laden mixes of color directly onto raw canvas. Her structures and shapes were open, controlled by natural forces while also describing them. Her paint and canvass became one surface. This was a big deal back in the day. Edges evaporated; accident was visible; so were her means and intentions. Pooling paint created varying viscosities of thickness and thinness; paint dried into imagistic river beds, isolated islands, clouds, continental masses that all evoked landscape without depicting it or engaging any abstract sublime. There was no paint-flinging or implied dance around the canvas. There was picture-making, pure and simple. And beauty. Lots of it. Which of course made people run back to labels like feminine.

You don’t have that many chances in your life. You have to know exactly what to do next. You know, I’ve been in Europe for so long, and I moved here [New York] for a reason. Now I’ve been eleven years in America. In these eleven years, I’ve made three pieces. But they’ve really made a difference: The House with the Ocean View, Seven Easy Pieces, and The Artist is Present. Three in eleven years. You know, it’s not much, but it is an enormous amount… The impact was important.

Do I think it’s good if people like it? I have to like it. If I think that something is good, it is fine. I mean Gladiator came out when my movie Before Night Falls came out. Gladiator won the Acadamy Award, Russell Crowe won the Acadamy Award. Would I rather be Ridley Scott? No. Do I think Javier Bardem’s performance was better than Russell Crowe’s, although Russell is an excellent actor? Yes. Javier Bardem’s performance was better. Did we win the Oscar? No. Does it matter? No. I mean he was the first Spanish actor to ever be nominated for an Academy Award. What does that say about the Academy? There is a level of chauvinism over there; it’s a club.