OBEY Indeed

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Shepard Fairey

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

Printmaker Shepard Fairey was recently on the Colbert Report. Midway through the clip, he explains his concept behind the Andre the Giant OBEY posters/stickers/t-shirts/etc. Funny, cause I always assumed he was mocking himself for obeying the WWE after they sued him for violating Andre the Giant's name and image. Get sued for making these:



What do you do? Stylize the likeness, drop the name and look what you get:



This would be Morpheus hopes to snap people out of the Matrix of their mindless routine and get them to question the rules when he in fact is obeying the lawsuit filed against him. It's one thing to spraypaint a building at night and drive off or stick a sticker on a streetlight when the coast is clear and then walk away; it's quite another when a team of lawyers comes knocking at your door and threatens your bank account. Hey, at least he's not going after people using his Obama image.

Sensuality in Late Medieval Illumination

Caravaggio, Cupid, 1601

On Thursday night, Thomas Kren, senior curator of manuscripts at the Getty, delivered a wonderful lecture ascribing the roots of erotically charged Renaissance and Baroque art, from Titian's Urbino to Caravaggio's Cupid, to the series of Illuminated Book of Hours that the Limbourg brothers created for Jean Duc de Berry, a wealthy late 14th century patron related to three successive French kings. Kren's convincing argument posited that just as Caravaggio's Cupid was intended to shock, titillate, and delight those viewers lucky enough to pull aside the green curtain that covered it, so were certain aspects of the Limbourg's creations, from the way the dead body of Christ was depicted in a lamentation scene, to more obvious examples of semi-nude figures in scenes of St. Catherine and Procession of Flagellants. Just as the Caravaggio was hidden by the curtain, the miniature would have all been concealed by the book itself and its cover. The Duc in this way acted as a gate keeper, controlling who had access to view this potentially shocking depictions of human sexuality and sensuality. In this way, manuscript illumination in the late 14th and early 15th century became a vehicle for certain artists to challenge to mores of the time, dependent of course on the tastes of their patron.


Limbourg Brothers, Zodiacal Man, 1413-1416

LOST: Have You Seen My Serra

It's difficult to fathom how a museum (or storage company for that matter) could misplace a 38-ton Richard Serra sculpture. But they did and it has since been replaced by a copy the artist signed-off on. What I find even more perplexing is the prospect that if the original is somehow recovered, it will be destroyed. In this circumstance, the duplicate has been endowed with the aura of the original. Wouldn't it make more since to destroy the copy? Or just keep both. Why destroy either one?

In a related story, the Reina Sofia has an ambitious new director. Needless to say, I was underwhelmed by this museum during my visit around a decade ago. Now the Prado's a tough act to follow, but the Reina Sofia, which was originally a hospital, was still haunted by that creepy institutional feeling that so define hospitals. The most immediate impact must surely be the changes to the Guernica room. The museum's undoubted masterpiece, this painting was kept in isolation like a patient afflicted with a highly contagious disease. Its impact was diminished by the stark emptiness of the room. Now that its got some related companions, it ought to bring a bit of life back.

Around Town: Culver City

Cole Case

A few things worth mentioning going on in Culver City presently. Cole Case is up at Western Project. A great show of about half a dozen scenes of Southern Califonia, including the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the Hollywood Bowl, and what I was told was El Coyote, the Mexican restaurant on Beverly Blvd. The most enjoyable aspect of the show for me was Case’s marvelously varied use of paint. Different thickness of paint and multiple mark-making techniques are employed, in each instance, for very specific reasons that enhance the composition. One broad, stick stroke becomes the side pages of a Dune paperback resting on a picnic table. The lines the bristles leave behind function, almost sculpturally, as the texture of the pages. I noticed that the brush was dragged from right to left, and held for a moment before being lifted from the canvas. This slight moment of hesitation, as if the painter contemplated dragging the brush back the other direction before lifting it, added an element of spontaneity to otherwise highly controlled and well thought-out paintings. In the painting of El Coyote, thick strokes of grey paint are transformed into mortar (as Pagel picks up on in his nice review). There is a naïve quality to Case’s work. The subject matter would surely befit any Outsider artist. Yet Case is clearly fluent in the language of painting, for the decisions he makes are informed and loaded, despite their simplistic appearances. Yet Case manages to perform the greatest feat of not coming off as ironic or mocking. He is not making fun of a style of painting, as if putting on an accent. Instead, the sheer love of creation that imbues the work of Outsider artists can also be felt in Case’s paintings. These are earnest tributes both to Southern California and to a school of paintings that is typically neglected by the mainstream art world.

Around Town: 6150 Wilshire

Last weekend, the evening started at the 6150 compound. You know what that means: free Grolsch! The complex has recently seen some changes, with Roberts and Tilton moving to Culver City and Karyn Lovegrove heading home to Handcock Park, paving the way for expansions by ACME, Mark Foxx, and 1301PE.


Davis Rhodes, Installation View

We started at ACME, where Davis Rhodes, a recent graduate from Columbia, was showing his lo-fi creations. Now, what looked appeal on website thumbnails ended up disappointing in person. Large pieces of plastic taped off and spray painted. Curved boards stand on their own like sculptures. Flat panels are stapled to the wall. Yes, that’s right stapled to the wall. How much more post-punk can you get? If this fact alone doesn’t convince you that Rhodes cares very little for his own work, then surely the presence of creases and nicks in the sides will. To be fare, I haven’t seen the second half of this show at sister in Chinatown, but I don’t really think I want to at this point. Rhodes seems not to care about his own art, so why should I?


Kristin Baker, Seven League Moon, 2008

ACME has dedicated a small side room to selections from various artists they represent. Thankfully, each time I step in that room I think to myself, “Finally, some good art!” This time they had a fantastic Kristin Baker work on mylar and a nice acrylic on canvas by Lisa Sanditz. Why can’t the rest of the gallery be this nice?


Lisa Sanditz, Sole Shop, 2008

1301PE as a gallery always puzzled me. They possess a top-notch roster, one of the most impressive in LA, yet I had been in closets that were bigger than there former space. Recently, they expanded to include the floor below. Slightly awkward, but much more becoming. Kirsten Everberg, whose work I admired in the Hammer group show “Undiscovered Country” several years back, was showing. She uses controlled drips of oil and enamel. The process has the effect of making her images of interiors appear as if they were viewed through a wet windshield. This show was dedicated to medium to large format canvases depicting monochromatic landscapes of forests.


Kristen Everberg's Birches

The uniformity of surface and limited depth of field of the forests resulted in an all-over flatness. Sadly, the majority of these pictures were lacking compared to the rest of her oeuvre.


Gustav Klimt's Birches

Unlike Klimt’s famous birch tree paintings, where a range of colors and brushmarks activate the compositions and create a push and pull between surface and illusion of depth, Everberg’s birches tend to blend into each other, blurring the sense of space. They may work better from afar, but even in 1301PE’s new digs, you still can’t really step back and admire a work without backing into a wall.

Amy Sillman Lecture

O & N, 2007

Amy Sillman, who must be one of the most celebrated abstract painters working today, spoke at the Hammer Wednesday night (in what was her first digital slide talk). As she was addressing an audience comprised largely of UCLA art students, she began with images of work from her student days. The art of her oeuvre was quite fascinating to watch unravel, as I was completely unaware of her earlier work. Somehow I assumed she had always been making paintings like the work she is known for today, so I was somewhat surprised to learn that abstraction is something she has slowly, methodically worked her way towards. She spoke about the challenge of being a painter in the seventies, when painting was declared, if not entirely out of fashion, dead. As well, she characterized abstraction as a sort of exclusive club that you had to work your way into in order to abandon representational imagery.

Sillman’s early work has a graphic quality that brings to mind the line of “street artists” like Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee. Little characters inhabit large, abstracted landscapes, performing silly tasks like walking off the canvas. Sillman spoke of the significance of narrative in these early paintings, as if she was trying to tell a story in paint the way film does. She mentioned a range of influences on her work, including the prominence of Lake Michigan’s horizon in Chicago (where she grew up), the time she spent living in India, and Italian paintings. She declared Sienese master Sassetta to be her favorite artist (at least while in art school). The narrative structure of Italian Renaissance painting (specifically multi-panel cycles like Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel) is probably the most notable link between the this era and Sillman’s early work. As such, time plays a significant role.


I, 2008

In effect, a multi layered abstract canvas, where what we see in its finished states is merely the skin covering the internal body built up of prior layers, is a facade. Painting is a battle, an argument between the artist and the medium. If she was not disappointed with a piece somewhere during the process of its creation, Sillman declared she cannot be satisfied. The painting begins without a masterplan and evolves organically, with the artist navigating between those areas that work well and those that need to be reworked until the point when, as if magically, the composition coalesces into a coherent, balanced canvas, the finished piece. In this respect, the process of painting becomes almost conceptual in nature, as what the viewer finds is a record of the duration of its creation. Abstract painting is a visual diary of the artist’s struggle with the work, a representational depiction of the process of painting itself, the working and reworking the is inherent in creation.

Oranges and Sardines: Horrible Title

Eva Hesse, H + H, 1965

Last Sunday there was a discussion at the Hammer Museum between curator Gary Garrels and the artists he selected to participate in the recently opened show Oranges and Sardines: Conversations on Abstract Painting. Six artists were selected, and one of their own works was included, along with works by those other artists they have been influenced by. The featured artists are Mark Grotjahn, UT Knoxville alum Wade Guyton, Mary Heilmann, Amy Sillman, Charline Von Heyl, and her hubbie Christopher Wool. I was surprised to discover that all the artists were present for the discussion, which unfortunately was a bit of a snoozer, although I told myself that I was merely closing my eyes while continuing to listen. Topics veered from the state of abstract paintings (basically an all-encompassing, unanswerable question) to the role of the sublime in abstract paintings (if there is any).

Conversation got a little heated around this last point, specifically between Von Heyl, who believed the sublime has something to do with contemporary abstract painting (what, I am not sure) and Amy Sillman who more or less told her she was full of shit (but in a more polite way). I completely agree with Amy here, that the sublime is a crisis that occurs upon discovering a phenomenon that cannot be explained rationally. Now I have never been to a museum of gallery and found something on the wall that I was unable to explain how it possibly could exist. Typically, the answer is something along the lines of: it’s paint, or that’s a photograph. Sometimes art is tricky, sometimes things appear to be other than they are, but never in my experience have I found a work of art to be crisis inducing. Now, the word “sublime” is also used vernacularly to mean “awesome” or “great.” It’s fine to use the word in this way, but don’t then pretend that it has some deeper philosophical meaning, cause it doesn’t.

Mark Grotjahn looked like he didn’t want to be there and used the platform as an opportunity to bash LATimes critic David Pagel for saying it looked like he was trying to make bad paintings. Grotjahn stated in fact, he was trying to make nice paintings, which I think they are, and if Pagel really wants to invoke the ironic move of intentionally making bad paintings, he should first find bad painting, such as Josh Smith. Grotjahn’s controlled, carefully rendered butterfly paintings hardly qualify as bad.

I did notice one thing about the show that disturbed me, and that was that several of the paintings selected by Von Heyl and Wool for inclusion in this exhibition came from their personal collection. Considering how the provenance of a museum exhibition, and publication in the accompanying catalogue, increases the value of a work of art, isn’t this a gross conflict of interest? How they got away with this, I cannot understand. Lastly, regarding the show, I think Amy Sillman presented the best room, highlighted by a stunning green Howard Hodgkin. Interesting to note that Philip Guston appeared twice in separate artists’ rooms. Looks like painters are looking at Guston. Where this might lead, I don’t know; but hopefully away from any pretense of the sublime.