It seems crazy that MOCA, one of the most important and influential contemporary art museums in the world has only been around for 30 years, and I suppose it speaks to the ingenuity of its founders that it has made such an impact in that time. To celebrate its 30th birthday, chief curator Paul Schimmel has pulled 500 works by over 200 artists and divided them between the museum’s two locations, organized chronologically. The MOCA Grand Avenue takes us from “the abstract expressionism of the 1940s and 50s to pop, minimal and conceptual art of the 60s and 70s.” Then hop over to the Geffen Contemporary to see important works from the 70s onward, featuring pieces like Edward Ruscha’s “Chocolate Room” and Douglas Gordon’s “Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake).”
There are always plenty of opportunities to see work by contemporary artists, but what makes this exhibition so important is that all of them, and I really mean all of them, are together, side by side, in one location.
The Los Angeles Times Magazine examines fifty different LAPD badges from the past 140 years paired with significant moments from the City of Angels’ less than angelic history. The visual timeline starts with an eight-point badge from 1869 and the Chinese Massacre of 1871 when a mob of 500 murdered 19 Chinese immigrants in Chinatown.
LA artist Joshua Callaghan’s comissioned public art project is the inverse of typical street art and graffiti. Rather than painting images that disrupts public spaces, Callaghan takes on unsightly utility boxes littering Los Angeles neighborhoods by covering them with vinyl digital images that resemble their surroundings. The paradoxical result is that these boxes attract more attention as well as blend into the urban landscape.
“Mac and Retna are unlikely partners. Mac is a photorealist, Retna is all brush.” More unlikely still is the fact that their giant murals, usually the stuff of city streets, have been popping up in places like Art Basel, Miami and on September 26th at the Robert Berman Gallery in Los Angeles. While the photorealism portion is certainly the focus of the murals, it’s Retna’s calligraphic contribution I’m more interested in. The background of piece above, which debuted at Art Basel, a kind of deconstructed Old English, could stand on its own as a pattern.
“Vagos y Reinas” at the Robert Berman Gallery from Sept. 26 – Oct. 7
If the name Julius Shulman doesn’t immediately ring a bell, what about names like Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, or Mies Van der Rohe? Julius Shulman documented them all. But he did more than just take pictures of famous buildings.
Matthew’s post the other day showed via time lapse photography the scale and terror of the wildfires ravaging Los Angeles right now. While those moving images are indeed impressive many stunning, horrifying, yet beautiful still images are being captured too. The Los Angeles Times has created a special spot on their website documenting the images. They have a section dedicated to High-res images and a general gallery featuring the fire, the city, the firefighters, and the people living in harm’s way. They’re mesmerizing.
As wildfires lick the hills of California, a couple different photographers have captured time lapse footage of the fires spread. The New York Timeslinked to the first video below which recorded the fires at sunset from LA’s Mulhulland Drive this past Saturday. Set to music by Brian Eno, the second video is a more poetic commentary on the mesmerizing beauty of these fires–too bad humans and our “development” get in the way of Mother Nature!
Paul Reubens, he of public masturbatory fame, is reviving the character that made him world famous: Pee-wee Herman. Herman started out as a crude stand-up act and then became a popular children’s TV show and a feature film directed by Tim Burton. Beginning in November, Pee-wee will be performing live at the Fonda Theater in Hollywood. And yes, Chairry, Pterri the pterodactyl and Miss Yvonne will be present. Maybe a trip to LA is in order?
Robert Rauschenberg’s “Small Rebus” 
