Brian D.'s Profile

1/22/2014

Yelp is useful. When I'm in a new neighborhood and need a bite to eat I always open my Yelp app and search for a good local spot. I've found great places through Yelp that I'd never have found by accident--a Himalayan restaurant above a nail salon in Queens, a homey mom-and-pop café in a LA business center. But even more than the useful of Yelp I like its funny and cool. Yelp will publish anything, and people write some really weird stuff. Once I came across a Yelp page for a subway station where one girl had written "I like this station because it's right near my house." Good for you. I also like to read reviews of places like Burger King or CVS. why would anyone yelp them? No one goes to BK without already knowing what to expect. The brand managers of a big chain make sure the customer experience is consistent and predictable no matter what location you're in. That's what we expect of them--sameness. And yet for all the apparent sameness a Yelp review of Dunkin Donuts can be really fun and interesting to read. Because the reality of life is that every experience is unique. And Yelp--as a place where any brand that isn't Yelp has no power to manage the consistency of its image--reveals that truth.

I'm into art, so even though I've been using Yelp for years I didn't start my own Yelp account until I happened upon a Yelp page of a gallery while googling and it occurred to me that I too could Yelp about art. I hadn't thought it through at the time but since then I've come to realize what appealed to me is this expression of subjective experience rubbing against the sameness of the art world. The Guggenheim is like Burger King. You don't go there because it got good reviews on Yelp. You go there because you know the brand. You've been to museums before, if not the Guggnheim, and you know what it will be like. The Gugg is similar to what you get at the Whitney, and though all the galleries in Chelsea have their own name they all belong to the global brand of "contemporary art." And that brand strives for consistency as much as BK. How galleries show art is totally standardized, white walls purifying space around the art, and how they talk about art is standard too. Museum wall texts or gallery press releases have a uniform scholastic style that can be unreadable. And they don't account for all the ways art can be in the world--the way art looks in a studio or a home is very different from a museum and the way people experience it there is different too. Going to galleries you come to assume that that's the only way art can be--but its not true! I like reading art reviews on Yelp to be reminded of this and I write them for the same reason.

The weird thing about Yelp is that even though it's a platform for a diversity of voices it also obscures them by averaging them out in one rating and just publishing an unreadable number. if I'm trying to choose a satisfying restaurant I'll look at some positive reviews and some negative ones to see what vibes with my own tastes and judge based on that. But the vast majority I'll never read. So visibility of difference ends up as invisibility. It's not a person's opinion that matters but Yelp's aggregation. People have tastes, Yelp has authority. It's not enough for a business to say "People love us." It's "People love us ON YELP." Yelp's the critic. Which is interesting because the critic--of art or of food or whatever--has traditionally been a human with feelings like any other but a superior skill for articulating these feelings through rational argument. That's what public discourse of newspapers holds in esteem--reason. But Yelp as a corporate entity or software app takes the burden of reason away from us humans. It calculates value for us, leaving us with our subjective human feelings. And it needs us to have them. It's not enough for a business to say "Yelp says we are good." It's "People LOVE us on Yelp."

Maybe I'm taking this too far but I see this as a reflection of what's happening politically. The critic appeared around the same time as representative democracy and the appearance of Yelp as a critic seems to coincide with a post-democratic governance, or whatever you'd call it. "Corporations are people" now and the government serves those corporate people with the nominal default approval of the humans born on its land who don't bother to leave. There are polls for measuring how people FEEL about govt performance but no real means of DOING anything with those feelings. Measurements of public opinion have nothing to do with real power--citizenship is the same kind of visible invisibility available on Yelp. As citizens we're like users, powerless even when active or "elite," giving the corporate people license to do what they want just by continuing to live. So I see Yelp as a model for how society works now. And that's what makes Yelp interesting If a little frightening/depressing. As a tool for understanding how things are in the world, it's useful.

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.

1/22/2014

The big advantage that LA museums have over New York Museums in terms of architecture is the weather, which makes it possible to have all the gorgeous outdoor spaces--the courtyards, the gardens, the promenades--featured at the Getty, the Hammer, and of course, at LACMA as well. These really improve the museum-going experience, in my opinion. (But weather alone doesn't excuse all the terrible designs of NYC museums... get it together, New York!)

So that was one thing I really liked about LACMA. Another part of it is the variety of buildings on the campus, and of the approaches to installation found inside them. I loved the 1980s feel of the Japan building, with its ponderous gold-and-black elevator and the bonsai angles of the vitrines and the pale greenish tinge of the light in it, which complemented the objects on display therein, ranging from chunky medieval vases to delicate miniatures and inked assemblages on paper from the late 20th century. Other noteworthy displays are the pre-Columbian artifacts, where the walls are undulating stacks of thin wooden slats, and short curtains bordering the tops of the walls work with the colors of the vitrines' interiors to modulate a rainbow as you pass through the galleries, and also the South Pacific galleries, where the graceful curves of the wooden totems and tools are replicated in the benches and the arcs in which the objects themselves are positioned.

So yeah. I like the separation of the buildings and the variety that goes with them, but LACMA needs a ticketing system to go with it! They give you a paper ticket which you have to show every time you enter one of the galleries on the campus, which is a hassle, and what if you lose it? I got really annoyed when I went to the fourth floor of the American building and the security guard demanded to see my ticket. Look buddy, I showed it when I entered on the plaza level!! How did he think I got in?? I don't like a museum to make me feel like I'm in a police state where I constantly have to affirm my right to be there. This could be easily solved if they just gave people stickers to wear, like at some other museums. Please look into it LACMA.

Also I'm sorry but the Broad contemporary building at LACMA is really bad. Just a stack of huge galleries showing huge installations that have nothing to do with each other. Because of the galleries' size there are lots of stairs between each level, and the gigantic elevator is incredibly slow, so I feel like I spent more time moving among floors than I did looking at the art (exaggeration, but still). And I thought about the construction site for another Broad museum downtown, where the ads named a litany of the most famous artists: Damien Hirst! Takashi Murakami! Jeff Koons! YAWN!! How many Broad Museums does a city need??!? I think LA would be fine with none.

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

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

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.

1/4/2014

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.

1/4/2014

My first impression of this place was, why so dark? If you hang a right upon first entering and go to the selections from the permanent collection the first gallery you see has no lights, so it's hard to see the work, especially the Jackson Pollock painting from 1947/8 that is all crimson, forest green, black--I think it's those colors, it's really hard to distinguish them with no lighting! As you go on it gets better--the second gallery is all Rothko's and also dim, presumably to help create the "intimacy" that Rothko, in a quote pasted to the wall, says large paintings create by immediately iniviting you into them, which I'm not sure I buy, but anyway. The lighting gets better but that's not to say that ambience issues are not problematic in other ways. A video room featuring recent acquisitions has a few videos on monitors with headphones, and chairs to sit down in and watch, which is nice, but in one of the projected videos with sound on speakers, making background sound for the whole room, there's a guy using a chainsaw, very LOUDLY, so I could hear it through the headphones while trying to watch Mark Leckey's "Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore" and it was VERY distracting/annoying. Maybe noise-cancelling headphones would be worth the investment if that's how you're going to install video. A highlight of that room was Andrea Fraser's "Little Frank and His Magic Carp," in which the artist listens and reacts to the audio guide at the Guggenheim Bilbao while the voiceover guy on the guide talks about how the curved walls of Frank Gehry's design are so "sensual" (and he's British so he says "sen-soo-al" not "sen-shoo-al" which is gross) and tells people to touch and fondle those undulations. Anyway Andrea Fraser ends up pulling her little green dress up so you can see her buttcheeks and panties as she grinds on a fake stone column. I liked this video because it made me laugh out loud. And clocking in at six minutes, it's a great length for video art.

I spent some time in the basement reading room, which was nice and quiet and had a lot of comfy modern furniture to relax in while skimming the books from their library. But the books are SO disorganized! some are piled up on tables, the shelves are a mess, with books leaning in diagonal stacks instead of orderly rows, and again--poor lighting!! The lighting in the reading area is fine, but around the shelves it's super dim, so to read the spines you have to bend low and get your nose right up against the shelf. Very poorly conceived in my opinion. But otherwise a nice reading room.

In summation I'd say my experience here was uneven all around. Even walking through the galleries I got a sense of major inconsistency. Half the museum is a permanent display of works from the collection, the other half is recent acquisitions. The permanent display part was more or less a textbook account of art since 1945, and if you've been to other museums of modern art you won't be surprised by how the galleries are put together, and might I add they are put together quite well, albeit a little lacking in imagination. But the layout of the new acquisitions felt totally random to me. My attempts to discern the reasons why certain works were hung in the same gallery resulted in utter bafflement. Continuity certainly was not helped by so many of the installations in this section being totally over the top. It would be great if the curators who did the permanent collection and the curators who did the new acquisitions could have a pow-wow and share some lessons with each other on structure and spontaneity, respectively.

12/5/2013

I come here for sushi at least once a week. One time while I was eating it in-store a middle-aged man walked up to me and asked, rather conspiratorially, like he didn't want the employees to hear: "is the sushi any good?" he siad. "be honest." I'm going to tell you what I told him: I'm not a sushi conoisseur by any means, but it tastes fine to me, I've never felt sick from eating it, and since whenever you buy one pack of sushi you get a second one ($6 or less value) free, it's a great deal.

12/5/2013

Great gallery. I recently learned that on Saturdays, members of the gallery's staff (and even Andrea Rosen herself) stand in the gallery and talk to visitors about the work. It's very generous--I got a full tour of a fascinating show, "Counter Forms," with works by Tetsumi Kudo, Alina Szapocznikow, Paul Thek and Hannah Wilke, all of whom worked in different parts of them world, died youngish and were forgotten in the 90s but making a comeback now. And they deserve it: weird materials and biomorphic forms, industrail waste and synthetic pigments, intriguing use of slightly sickening colors and textures--a fertile mix of mad-science lab and contemplative poetry that seems to speak to the ways in which artists are dealing with the relationship between bodies and technologies now.

Usually Andrea Rosen has a few shows up at once - a big one in the front, medium in the middle, and a selection of works by different artists in the showroom in the far rear, which means you're guaranteed to find SOMEthing to like on any given visit. For 'Counter Forms," however, the whole gallery was devoted to this single group exhibition. But it's definitely worth it! so much to see.
 
There is also a small appendix across the street. I feel like the narrowness of this space makes it slightly awkward. It's smaller than any of the spaces across the street, even the little showroom in the back. I haven't felt really impressed or moved by a show here yet but, it's new so maybe they'll get the hang of it (no pun intended!).