What can paintings do? According to Laura Owens, they can be clocked and stretched, gridded and smeared, silkscreened with armies of cats and personal ads, representational and abstract, both a surface and ever simply, at the end, a picture. In the late '90s and early 2000s, Laura Owens was one......
The first test patterns I ever saw were slapsticky meta-jokes mixed into after-school cartoons. Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck might walk off frame and into one. Or they appeared as dated references in movies made before I was born, archaic technologies of a visual analog past. I have a vague......
Ancient dreams and antique corruptions have been haunting a couple of L.A. galleries. The paintings of JP Munro at International Art Objects and Gustave Moreau at the Hammer Museum possess a mischievous magic, creating scenes that look as if they're from a lost Hollywood masterpiece, set in epic ruins, undulating......
I drove 341 miles to see Michael Heizer's 1970 artwork Double Negative, but I have not walked the 150 yards from LACMA's ticket booth to see his freshly installed Levitated Mass. I've been to the museum since the 340-ton boulder was consecrated, but I haven't yet ambled behind the Resnick......
Neither Leigh Ledare nor Michel Auder makes art for the complacent. With current exhibitions on opposite sides of the city, the two artists use reality — often their own lives — to subtly creep through desire and fantasies, the instability of meaning and the permeability between the fictional and the......
Down on La Cienega Boulevard, things hang in the balance. Held aloft by a single wire, a 14-foot metal I-beam stands delicately balanced on its corner. A giant granite stone nearby perches atop a steel tower. Things are melting and oozing, stacked and cracked, stretched taut and left to dry......
Though it may seem common, it's almost impossible to get rediscovered. There is likely a handful of novels equal to Moby Dick in some fusty East Coast atheneum ready to be undusted and perhaps actually read by an intrepid librarian. Even discovery is not enough — the thing has to......
This past year, Los Angeles has been haunted by dreams of itself. For years, I've passed the Olive Motel on Sunset in Silver Lake — such a strange stray dog of a building, eminently adoptable. I've thought of trying to buy it with nonexistent money to start businesses I have......
In case you hadn't heard, there is art in Los Angeles — and a lot of it. With more than 60 exhibitions by museums, gobs more by commercial galleries, a performance festival and a post-punk parade to wend its way down Broadway, this ginormous art initiative called Pacific Standard Time,......
1945: Neapolitan immigrant Simon Rodia is midway through building the biggest, weirdest and least commercially viable sculpture in Los Angeles in the historically black neighborhood of Watts, the Watts Towers. Rumor has it that an alternate site was where the Beverly Hilton is in Beverly Hills, which, some argue, would......
