Brian D.'s Profile

9/29/2013

My favorite thing in the Jonas Wood exhibition that's currently on view at Anton Kern is a gray dog at the bottom of a big painting--a schnauzer? not good with breeds here--that looked so funnily uneven and odd, not only because its head was cocked to one side, its eyes looking directly out of the painting at the viewer in that inquisitive, expectant way that dogs do--but also the way its face was painted was split in half, making its expression not just searching but also insane. Some dogs really have expressions like that! The split in the face was mainly caused by the way Wood paints--making strips of paint with ragged edges, as if he's dragging the brush downward in a very tense zig-zag, leaving these skinny tight tiretracks of paint. The dog is made of these stripes. In Wood's paintings lots of different things--animals, furniture, whatever--are made of these strips. But not everything is, so there is a variety of texture to his surfaces that I find appealing, and it nudges against the repetitive pleasure of the stripe patterns.

Jonas Wood's paintings are mostly interiors, and when they're not they are the kind of paintings you'd expect to find in a normal home--a portrait of a pretty peacock, some flowers, a portrait of a couple--and he underscores the fact that he's making "paintings of paintings" by cleverly inserting them in his interiors. So in the one with the dog at the bottom, you can see the peacock painting (which hangs separately in the same gallery) IN that painting. There's a painting of a poker tournament, the one thing in the show that might be thought of as happening in a public space, but you can tell from lettering on it that it's a painting of a TV screen, so again the perspective is domestic. And the television studio where the poker game is being played is made up of the same stripes that the dog is.

I wouldn't say Jonas Wood is a mind-blowing painter but I certainly enjoyed myself looking at his work.

10/16/2013

A rubbery, tepid and overspiced chicken cutlet, a sad stripe of orange cheese half-melted on (that they apparently added another dollar to the price for), two handfuls of hot jalapenos (when I asked for hot peppers I thought I'd give the yellow banana peppers?), a mouthful of chewy white bread--everything about the chicken sandwich there I got was gross. It was supposedly a hot sandwich but there was nothing hot about it. Shouldn't that mean they throw it in the oven for two minutes to get the bread crisp? Anyway I threw it out after one bite, what a waste of $6.50. It was full of people sitting at the tables, who either know something I don't about this place or know jack about sandwich.

12/5/2013

The bacon/bratwurst sandiwiches on pretzel buns and the mac-n-cheese bites were so delicious that I would consider hosting a wedding reception here just to see trays of those apps again. Not that I'm in danger of getting married anytime soon, ha ha. But I would jump at the chance to party here again, in the big Biergarten with the outdoor tables, indoor tables, balcony, stage, etc. Very versatile space!

12/5/2013

This was the second elite event I've been to and I had a good time getting to know more members of the community. And I live in Jackson heights so it was really convenient for me! To be honest, I don't think that Delhi Heights has the tastiest Indian cuisine in the neighborhood. But that's not to say I or the other yelpers I talked to didn't enjoy it. Everyone ate up and had a great time. And that's what I love about the Yelp Elite--it's not about being a foodie, a snob, or a picky eater, as the word "elite" might suggest in other contexts. It's about positive attitude and cleanign your plate and going back for more! That's what I did.

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  funny and useful notice in the bathroom

  funny and useful notice in the bathroom

1/4/2014

Currently on view at Cherry and Martin is a small selection of works by Alan Shields, who I wrote about previously in the update to my review of Paula Cooper Gallery, in New York. To recap, he is a painter from the 60s and 70s who experimented with fabrics and techniques from the realms of crafts. I discovered a new side of his work here--some concrete poems, where he took words from ads or a newspaper, repeated them and mixed them up, and typed them out on a typewriter. It was interesting to know he did that but I prefer his paintings. There was one I really enjoyed at this show, a big rough and dirty canvas with a misshapen grid of splotches, concentrated in color in the center and wetly bulging outward, as if he'd laid out a bunch of watercolor ice cubes on the canvas and let them melt as they will. I don't know how he really made it.  I should have asked the people who worked there. They were very nice.

1/9/2014

Very fancy. Have you seen Elysium? I just watched it last week on my flight to LA so it was hard not to think of it while walking around the Getty campus--this pristine, verdant paradise of beauty and leisure perched high above the swarming world below, like the satellite nation in the movie. The nice thing about the Getty (unlike Elysium) is its openness to we plebes. It welcomes anyone who can pay $15 for parking, or take the bus.

The panoramic views of LA, from downtown to the Pacific, are spectacular, and the gardens a delight. A friend said he thought the gardens didn't have enough natural messiness for him. But I thought the sequences of contrastive geometries to the flower beds, and the spilling of certain plant species from one area to another, gave a sufficient sense of spontaneity in its perpetual struggle with harmony. Just like in the materials of the buildings of the campus--the alternation of synthetic, smooth beige cubes and the rough-hewn blocks of rock, also beige. Hmm.. now that I make this comparison I'm starting to wonder, are the gardens too overdetermined after all?

Strolling around the campus and enjoying the serenity is the highlight of a visit to the Getty. The art collections are not quite so spectacular. I did enjoy a temporary exhibit in the galleries of the Research Institute, featuring old books with maps of the world, and detailed drawings of ancient Greco-Roman structures in the Middle East, or etchings of Egyptian mummies by 18th century French explorers. The grand size of the books and the exploratory nature of their contents conveyed a sense of wonder at a planet that hadn't yet been entirely photographed and GPSed. But nothing wow'ed me that much in the galleries of the permanent collections. They are fine, but seeing as how this is a relatively young museum they just don't have the treasures of the Met or the Hermitage or what have you. However, seeing all the paintings of Italianate landscapes, the rolling hills, the rocky slopes, the villas standing in for Palestinian houses in Renaissance religious paintings and the fragments of Roman edificies dotting the landscapes of the Romantics, gave me a sense of how the Getty imagines itself with regards to the past, and even a speculative glimpse of its future... it'll make a beautiful ruin someday.

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.

1/9/2014

The MOCA building is squat and yellowish--totally unremarkable, but situated in the plastic RGB monstrosity that is the Pacific Design Center it manages to look stately and dignified. Entrance is free, which is nice.

The exhibition I went to paired Bob Mizer and Tom of Finland, the post-war purveyors of beefcake and phallus fantasy.  The pairing was not particularly imaginative (Mizer hired Tom of Finland to illustrate the covers of his catalogs, and was actually the one who came up with the "Tom of Finland" nom de plume) nor did it tell any revelatory histories, or situate them in art history in an eye-opening way. A wall text in the Mizer gallery suggested that the way he laid out his catalogues, the grids of beefcake photos labeled with letters and numbers, was interesting in relation to the serial production of minimalist and pop art that would come after it--but if the curators really wanted to make that point, shouldn't they have included some of that art? and wasn't that art just responding to standard commercial practices, of which Mizer was just one example? In relation to modern art trends like appropriation and collage, there was a pair of Tom of Findland's "mood boards," with pictures he'd cut out of magazines and newspapers and porn rags, which were visually interesting, especially ones where he had drawn over the photographs to give the men the cartoonishly large buttocks and pecs that characterize his drawings, or the pic of three policemen where he'd drawn huge cocks coming out of their uniform flies. These details were rather small and easy to miss if you weren't paying attention so I wish the curators had done more to draw attention to these moments.

In terms of the history not of art but of erotica, you don't get the impression that either Mizer or Tom was influencing the other, they were both doing what they were doing at the same time. That, and the predominance of a handful of masculine archetypes--gladiators, sailors, cowboys, bikers, farmboys, mechanics--inscribed some fairly narrow contours for the mid-century homoerotic imagination. I had to wonder what Bob and Tom would make of mpreg, or furries, or World of Warcraft slash drawings with orcs fucking elves, or whatever else is polluting Tumblr and DeviantArt these days. You've come a long way, baby!  

I should note that Mizer's imagery came off as slightly more diverse than Tom's, with some skinnier/less worked out bodies, and a couple of odd additions to the aforementioned Pantheon of Masculinity--there were a couple of guys dressed a wizards in capes, thongs, and pointy hats, waving their wands at walls of runes or holding skull-capped staves. I thought those were really funny. I also liked a sequence titled "The Doctor and The Demon"--one guy with a stethoscope was examining another guy with little horns glued to his temples. Hmm.

Overall it was a fun, light (and, arousing :3) exhibit. But there was an incident that spoiled my impression of MOCA. I was meeting a friend who was running late, and as I lingered there was a shift change for the security guards. The new one was holding a ruler. As she paced the galleries she'd tap it against the walls. FWAP-FWAP-FWAP-FWAP-FWAP. She'd bang it on the metal bars of the stairway's banister. CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG. She would even (and this was what really FLOORED ME) bang it on the display cases that were holding Mizer's photos. DING-DING-DING-DING-DING. What a Racket!! I tried to just ignore her but at one point my friend shot her a Look of Death. You won't believe how she responded...

"Am I bothering you?"

Um...

uh...

Obviously there was no conceivable way to respond to this outrageous impudence.

If anyone at the Pacific Design Center is reading this, please Officially Reprimand her noisy rude ass. And confiscate the goddamn ruler

THANKS

4/27/2014

Soak or stroke? Stroke or soak? This is the question that continuously, but pleasurably, bedeviled me as I viewed the exhibition of paintings by Matt Connors at Canada gallery. Many of them had thick stripes that looked like the trail of a broad brush drawn briefly along the surface of the canvas but on closer inspection they revealed no trace of brushhair or the direct application of a hand, instead having a wet look suggesting that the canvas had been dipped in wet paint so as to leave a stain. But in some the approximation of a brushstroke shape was so close I could almost see the ahirs tingling at the pigment's edges like hairs on an excited neck! Here and there I would see drips lefts by a splash yet they were so rich and saturated I imagined the paint falling on the canvas in slo-mo like in a commercial for absorbent paper towels. In my favorite painting of the lot the strange soak/stroke stripes--in soft shades of the primaries, red, yellow and blue--danced in a configuration that was architectural but also like a quilt, somewhere between a map's legend and patchwork. Connors' paintings more than any others I've seen lately remind me of mid-century abstraction and its jazzy play of paint on the surface, and yet it's not like the old expressionism at all because it doesn't have that aggressive approach to the plane, instead there's a tender treatment of the canvas saying that the painting isn't just a surface, it's a depth, and I felt my eyes sinking into it, drowning in love for these paintings.

6/12/2014 Updated review

Another Kay Rosen show here, and I must say my impression this time was much improved. This time the texture of the wordplay drawings was more unified, and all of the letters in them were starker and more architectural which gave the exhibition an overall feel that relieved the sense of monotony I has previously experienced. Great to see a more continuous relationship between work and space though it's still not my favorite art