Where to begin? Where else but at this stage? A cotton boll embalmed in a bell jar like the Disney rose in Beauty and the Beast (1991): Aria Dean’s Dead Zone (1) (2017) gives the rose’s place to a white commodity once harvested by black people made commodities. The cotton...
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Word on the street is they got the Crenshaw Cowboy. Into a gallery, that is. Anyone who has turned onto the westbound I-10 at Crenshaw Boulevard has likely noticed him, an itinerant junk-assemblage artist who shows his sculptures at the top of the onramp. He also gives advice on fame...
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In a shallow bay window facing 2nd St., a ledge overflows with studio clutter: a couple dozen euros in coins between a few dying plants; a bowl filled with loose earrings and studs; a keycard from the Waldorf Astoria; a castle of used tea candles, Red Bull cans, and tiny...
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“Advertisting … is the only art form we [in the United States] ever invented.” Gore Vidal (1)
The fourth floor of Berlin’s Akademie der Künste overlooks Pariser Platz: the Brandenburg Gate, the French embassy fringed with barricades, a teeming Starbucks. Tourists mill around the square, while up on the mezzanine, between...
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Happy? Ronaldreagan. Hungry? Ronaldreagan. Afraid? Ronaldreagan. Invoke him often enough and The Gipper’s name passes from rote signification into a malleable abstraction. All too easy—as David Snyder demonstrates in “2THNDNL” with the video Ronald Reagan, Fathers & Sons (all works 2016). Dozens of jaws, clipped from TV’s talking heads, from...
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