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7 Reviews

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  • 10899 Wilshire Blvd
    Los Angeles, CA 90024
    5.0 star rating
    1/22/2014

    Have you ever felt elegant as you exited a parking garage? I did at the Hammer, which has my favorite architecture of any museum I've ever been to. The airy, gracious atrium leads up the main enfilade of galleries that encircle a courtyeard, connected by a broad balcony. Only in southern California, I suppose, could a museum have its visitors going outdoors between each exhibit.  The far side of the balcony had some very cool-looking deck furniture for lounging in, and two ping-pong tables. Fun!

    There was a great variety and quality to the exhibitions. My favorite was the comprehensive exhibtiion of the fascinating painting of Forest Bess - which presented his idiosyncratic ideas about gender and spirituality in a really accessible way, and just gave me a chance to look at the way he developed his philosophy of colors and mark-making and symbols, to approach painting as the creation of a new other world. There is some great stuff in the permament collection galleries--several drawings and bronzes based on them by Daumier, the 18th century caricaturist, who drew the ascendant bourgeoisie of his time as weird monsters whose faces are just emerging from a gooey flesh mass. I love him! I also enjoyed the retrospective of James Welling, a conceptual photographer who came up with various ways of using photographic technologies to produce abstract images rather than indexical ones. I like the colors of those photograms and gradients but some of his later work, shot in libraries, looks dull. I really hate conceptual art with old books in it. The artist is just like "look how smart I am" and I could care less, honestly.

    I also wasn't really into Tacita Dean's film, about the Spiral Jetty, which had some spiral-jetty-shaped cuts in the film, a cute gesture, but why make art about other people's art? I just don't get that. Then a show of a contemporary artist (I want to say her name is Kelly Crowland but now I'm realzing that can't be possible.. it was definitely Kelly something), with letters sewn on bags of rice, was not interesting at all but you win some you lose some, right?

    On the way out I noticed a gallery near the entrance that theoretically one could visit without paying for entry, because you don't have to pass the admissions desk to get there. The show there was a video about interrogation techniques--seemed a little heavy-handed to have the free gallery featuring "socially engaged" art but I nice gesture I suppose.

  • 3.0 star rating
    1/9/2014

    Handsome Coffee is a good name for this place because all of the men who work at and patronize the café are exceptionally handsome. Damn.

    That was my favorite thing about it. Second favorite was the bathroom, not only because it's big and clean but because it's THERE. In the week I've been in LA I've been to a few coffeehouses  and I was very disturbed by their lack of restrooms for customers. Even the Starbucks that I popped into didn't have one, and I only ever pop into Starbucks for the toilet.  Is it not known here that coffee makes people poop and pee? Handsome knows this, and that puts them in Los Angeles' coffee toilet avant-garde.

    In other areas, though, Handsome is backwards. There is no wifi. It's 2014, people!! A coffee shop without wifi is like an outhouse without a seat.

    Then there's the coffee. It's fine, but they charge $4 for a rather small mug. And there is no discount on refills! That would be justifiable if each cup was individually brewed (as is the case at most places where a cup costs $4), but at Handsome they charge four bucks for a refill dispensed from AN URN. wtf?!

    Five stars for people-watching and going to the bathroom. Two stars for the rest.

  • 2.0 star rating
    9/29/2013
    First to Review

    Paintings by Tatiana Berg at this gallery looked as if they were painted on a whiteboard--actually on a Japanese paper that's "basically plastic" according to the guy at the reception desk, but the end result was that the surface doesn't really soak in the paint, so the trick of painting them, I would imagine, is to get the paint to lie on the surface and dry there without just rolling of. The strokes therefore look quite forcefully and dramatically applied, yet nevertheless not that interesting, and the images that they're combined to make aren't memorable--some female figures, maybe a still life, I can't say what else. A couple of sculptural paintings were scattered across the floor--these were big buoys of raw canvas with paint applied in broad messy stripes. A pretty obvious way of stressing the strangeness of how the paint relates to the plasticky surface in the works on the wall, and it didn't make it any more compelling for me. I learned from reading the press release that this artist belongs to a "New Casualist" movement... but if you have an -ism, if you have all these blunt tricks, can you truly call yourself "casual"?

    Also I really don't like the name of this gallery. When I saw it on the window I assumed it was the name of Tatiana Berg's exhibition (which is actually called "Bill Murray") and thought it was a bad name for a show. But for a gallery, even worse.

  • 5.0 star rating
    6/29/2013
    1 check-in

    Shifting Chelsea's center of gravitas southward, this new gallery features a dramatic entrance--a broad, not-too-steep staircase which when you get to the top ends in a big reveal as you turn left. There it is--the cavernous gallery with vaulted wood beams, lots of natural light, and some really good art! I saw the Paul McCarthy show there. It's big wooden sculptures and drawings based on the artist's twisted vision of Snow White. Everything is warped--you can see Prince Charming on his white stallion, but the figure of him on his horse is split and repeated several times, fused with trees and dwarves, turned back on itself and sliced up into separate pieces, each with a smooth grain of wood that suggested no cut was ever made--that these weird fantasias just emerged into form. Decapitated heads of Snow White herself litter the floor, with blank, pupil-less eyes and a whorish hole of a mouth--actually not a hole but a divot with a rounded bottom, the right size to hold an apple, whole and unchewed. Here too the polish factor on the wood is very high, but the shallow oral cavity suggests a digging into the surface by a wood carver, without the possibility of penetration or a real inside. The imagination is twisted and broken up into pieces but each fragment emerges into being as if whole.  

    All around, this is a great gallery to visit. I didn't interact with the staff directly but overheard them talking and they seemed nice--one of the desk girls was so nice she even expained scallion cream cheese to her coworker. She told her about how an onion-like bulb has green shoots that get cut up and mixed with cheese. First week in new York honey?

  • 32 East 69th Street
    Manhattan, NY 10021
    5.0 star rating
    6/29/2013

    I would give this six stars if I could... the Paul McCarthy show there is beyond amazing. This is art that takes questions of representation and the figure head on, without any abstruse conceptual games but with a lot of spirit and guts--the result is a visceral wrenching experience. [Note: This review contains SPOILERS so don't read it if you're going to go see this Paul McCarthy show (closes July 26)] When you walk in you immediately see a young woman, so still that you know it's a sculpture, but so lifelike you have to make sure it's not breathing. She's on a rectangular pedestal, naked, leaning back on her palms, her legs stretched forward and spread. She has a highly expressive vagina that raspberries the viewer, its pouty outer lips loosely gripping the protruding tongue of the inner ones. There are several copies of her, making it all the more uncanny as you begin to recognizes the traces of craftsmanship and artifice.

    But still when I got to the second floor and saw all the monitors showing footage of the casting process, for a split second I couldn't believe that it wasn't animation. They were so HD that this woman, whom I'd seen sculpted downstairs and now alive and moving--the brightly rendered digital image of her body looked UNreal. I spent a good twenty minutes watching the model as she sat still on the podium, surrounded by fabricators and camera men working quickly to capture her image, both on video and in the mold. She got covered in blue goo and caked in plaster... and in the end they finally cut it all off, and she crawled out of her floppy blue skin like a molting snake.

    Finally, I went back downstairs on my way out... and was stopped in my tracks by the sculptures, which I now saw with totally new eyes. These things that had looked so lifelike to me upon first encounter now seemed pathetically fake. I could clearly see all the imperfections, the rubbery properties of the silicone flesh, all the differences between the mold and the model's HD body. Suddenly the whole thing reeked of death. Shivers down my spine.

  • 33 Garden Rd
    Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504
    4.0 star rating
    6/29/2013

    A lovely museum in a bucolic setting. Hessel makes a great stop on a day trip from the city, easy to combine with visits to DIA Beacon or the Storm King sculpture park if you've got a car. If not--then you can't do them all in one day, but be advised that the Hessel runs complimentary shuttles from Manhattan when they have openings. Beer, wine, soft drinks and pretzels at the opening are complimentary as well.

    All in all, a great place. But couldn't give it five stars because I'm not into the new shows. One is Haim Steinbach, an artist who never really got my juices running. His work is about shelving, display, minimalist art, the museum retail, etc.--a kind of third-wave pop/appropriation art (if you just read that and you were like "so what?" you feel me). What makes this show interesting--perhaps more so than others of his that I've seen--is what he did with the Hessel's permanent collection. A cool thing about the Hessel is that it's endowed with a small collection of important works of contemporary art but rather than put them up in the standard museum display they let invited artists and curators incorporate them in their shows, using unconventional and experimental display methods, the likes of which you would never see in your run-of-the-mill museum. Steinbach put up this construction-site scaffolding in the big gallery and arranged works above and below it, so you could glimpse the pieces (both museum works, Steinbach's own stuff, design objects, knickknacks etc.) in horizontal and vertical layers, that made you think about the status of each thing as an object or artwork.

    The other exhibition was Helen Marten, a young British artist. It was a smart pairing with Steinbach, though I like her work even less. It's also about objects and display, and coming up with quirky convoluted relations between things. Everything is about weight, balance, and borders, and everything is solid and in tension. There are papery woodcuts that look flimsy but hold up to the weight of loaded key rings hanging off of them, for instance. The paintings have stuff attached to the bottom of the frames, so they don't end with the canvas. It's about surfaces and repetition, too--there are cans of olive oil positioned on the floor around the galleries, and the olives and vines from the logo are repeated on the wall--yet nowhere in the show do you find the mess of the oil itself. This is also true in her videos. Digital media can be slippery, glitchy, pixelly, liquid--but when Helen Marten gets her hands on it she makes everything robust and shiny and glossy, crafting digits into beautiful perfect objects, just as hard and solid as the commodities she appropriates in her sculptures. Yawn.

    Great museum though!

  • 2.0 star rating
    7/3/2014

    This hotel is fine. My parents stayed there when they visited New York in 2005, I think, and they didn't have any problems with it. More recently I was there for a presentation of.. art? products? I don't know, by Cory Arcangel. Renting out a conference room on the second floor, the event was billed as a presentation of "surfwear," clothes to wear when surfing, not the waves but the internet--pretty standard T-shirts. But there were other things there as well, sheet music related to conceptual performance projects, some electrici tiki décor, like plastic glowing palm trees and icicle lights, a DVD tower full of shitty 90s comedies (Happy Gilmore etc.), a stack of books about contemporary art and how it's shown.. not to mention the DJ table, and the free donuts and coffee from Dunkin Donuts on a folding table and a mini-fridge, branded Coke, but stocked with Nice brand water from Duane Reade. Everything about it was aggressively average, low/middle brow--and I suppose the hope was that amassing all that in one palce (which is itself totally bland--a Holiday Inn conference room!) would eventually transcend it, concentrate it, make it special, but that's not what happened. It was just boring, textureless. Maybe the artist wanted to bore everyone.. certainly the grossly too-full-yet-undernourished feeling one gets after eating two Dunkin Donuts donuts was a bodily feeling that matched the aesthetic impression... I Can't figure out if that's an artistic achievement or what. After a while I moseyed over to the bar, conveniently located just outside the conference room in the second floor lobby, because the event was dry and I needed a martini. The drink was good but the bartender was slow and kept disappearing for long breaks, so I was glad I was the first attendee of Cory's event who decided (around 3:30 pm) that it was time to drink. I was originally planning to give this three stars but now that I've written it out I realize that nothing says it better than "meh" so, two stars.

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