Category: art
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Playing the L.A. River
“Park vs. condos debate—costumes recommended,” reads one of the instructions on a playing card for a plot of land near the Los Angeles River. This tongue-in-cheek prompt for open-air theater comes from a recently launched initiative called Play the LA River. Every card in the Play the River 51-card deck focuses on points of interest along…
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Review: Everything Loose Will Land
“Tip the world over on its side, and everything loose will land in Los Angeles,” said Frank Lloyd Wright. He was referring to the city’s salmagundi of building styles, but a fascinating exhibition at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House has repurposed the phrase. It looks at LA’s architecture and art from the…
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Dune Forum
A magazine on art, literature, and politics (with the occasional treatise on nudity) Dune Forum was published in the early 1930s in the artists’ colony of Moy Mell, on the central California coast. Its founding editor, Gavin Arthur, aimed to provide a view point that would “express the creative thought of America looking not toward Europe but toward the…
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On Carlos Zanni//Oil Data//CIA//Three Days of the Condor
“It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that.” —Don de Lillo, White Noise Every minute, numbers track the actions of nations and individuals worldwide, adding to an already dense storm of data. Digits scroll up and down incessantly, mapping the number of cold days in Bogota today as compared…
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Nostalgia for the Future/Future of Nostalgia
The Future of the Past: The World Trade Center Memorial and the Politics of Memory, surveys monuments to major political and national events, tracing their arc from triumphant and chauvinistic to melancholic and contrite. It sits unpublished on my bookshelf in severe black hardcover binding. Above is Deborah Aschheim’s lovely drawing of the Theme Building at…
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Profile of Trevor Paglen
I interviewed Trevor Paglen at Eyebeam, in New York, one afternoon in the fall of 2007. In talking with him about his work, and the research that goes into it, it was easy to get caught up in the dark tangles of government espionage. But he soberly asked me to view his work as art,…
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Venice Biennale – First Emirati Pavilion
For the May issue of Modern Painters I interviewed Tirdad Zolghadr, curator of the first UAE Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which features the work of Lamya Gargash (above). A couple excerpts: LK: Hasn’t the idea of a national pavilion been something that artists and curators at Venice have chosen to critique or obscure rather than…
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Book Review: Silvia Kolbowski and Walid Raad
Between Artists: Silvia Kolbowski and Walid Raad A.R.T. Press, 2008 “Do you think that a body of work can somatize such cultural trauma?” Silvia Kolboswki asks Walid Raad in the beginning of an email exchange that soon and unexpectedly begins to mirror such attempts. Raad received Kolbowski’s question last July at his home in Beirut…
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The Bubble of Bubbles (2008)
Jan Brueghel the Younger’s Allegory upon the Tulip Mania In the article A Second Tulip Mania in Prospect magazine this month, Ben Lewis and Jonathan Ford compare the contemporary art market of the past five years to the legendary tulipomania of 17th century Holland, when a single bulb sold for 40 times an average annual…
Lyra Kilston 