Your Social Life

Hello everybody,

another short edition of YSL, to announce a few selection of art-related things I would attend, if I wasn't on a writing deadline.
First of all, tonight two competing things are going to require you to stretch your attendance between Mixtape Volume 1 at Federal Art Project, featuring FBC! super favorite Juan Capistran, and many others, and a special movie projection at Cottage Home (more below). All the information you need about Mixtape 1 can be found here.

There's a life after today, and you can delight in it with something a little bit more, er, *family-friendly* with the Public Art Party in Beverly Hills on Saturday organized by For Your Art around the Yayoi Kusama sculpture. In what other place than LA can you experience conceptual porn AND giant polka-dotted flowers on the same week? Rumors say there will be some Kusama-inspired cupcakes too, but yours truly is on a diet, so if by any chance I make it there I won't succomb to temptation.
After Kusama, I'd suggest you head down to Chinatown where you can attend the opening for the Summer group show organized at Cottage Home by China Arts Objects as well as the one curated by Thomas Solomon (with Marcelo Rios)

This is all very well, but what was this other thing competing with Mixtape 1 tonight? Tonight is also the premiere of Lawrence Weiner's movie "Water In Milk Exists" at 8 PM (so you can go to Federal Art Project first) at Cottage Home. There's no link on their page, so please check all the info on the Facebook event page. Lawrence Weiner will say a few words, and just in case you haven't heard about it yet, it is a conceptual porn movie. When was the last time you saw one? Exactly. So, have fun tonight!

Please Allow Me To Introduce My Friend

FBC! is please to introduce its HUGE readership (hi Pam! hi Nancy!) to the latest offering by special gal pal Theresa Papanikolas, the former Wallis Annenberg Fellow at LACMA and the current curator of European and American art at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.
When at LACMA Theresa curated a great show, "Doctrinal Nourishment: Art And Anarchism In The Times of James Ensor", which did a great job of explaining Ensor's influences as well the artists he later influenced himself, and putting him in the context of the artists of his times, including FBC! favorite, Félicien Rops.
It was a jewel of a beautiful show to look at, and I'm very happy that finally the catalog/book is out. You can purchase it on Amazon, where it is amazingly inexpensive, prior to visiting the current Ensor show at MoMA.





Another reason why you should buy this book? Yours truly is on a writing deadline, of the kind that pays the rent, unlike amateurish (if LA-centric) blogs, so I won't have time to write much for you guys before a few weeks, and I'm not sure I'll be able to post more stuff from Renee Montgomery, our current blogger-in-residence. It's OK, it's the Summer, what's better than a little Ensor to reflect on the spirit of our times?



Pictures:
1) the cover of the catalogue,
2.) James Ensor. Masks Confronting Death. 1888. Oil on canvas, 32 x 39 1/2" (81.3 x 100.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund,
3) Artwork: Baron James Ensor (Belgium, Ostende, 1860–1949), The Doctrinal Nourishment (Alimentation doctrinaire), 1889–95 (detail), LACMA, print, etching printed with tone and hand-colored with white gouache and with red, yellow, and blue chalk and watercolor, image: 9 3/8 x 7 1/16 in. (23.81 x 17.94 cm); sheet: 9 1/4 x 11 5/8 in. (23.5 x 29.53 cm); mat: 16 x 20 in. (40.64 x 50.8 cm), purchased with funds generously provided by the Joan Palevsky Bequest (M.2007.6). © James Ensor Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Brussels, and 4)

Your Social Life In Los Angeles And Los Angeles In NYC

Hello dear beloved readers,

Sorry for being one day late to post YSL, our connection here at FBC! worldwide headquarters went down yesterday for a very, very long time.
So this weekend, I know you will need some cultural distraction after reeling from Celebs Holocaust. You can start and go pay a visit to Cosmopolitan Book Shop to load on print culture, then attend a few openings that are going to make you stretch quite a bit geographically.

First of all there is Michael Rashkow's opening at China Art Objects from 6 to 9. There's also the opening of the recent UCI grads at LAXart, and of course the opening of the shows at the Armory Art Center in Pasadena, where yours truly would have showed up, had I been in better shape physically. There's the exhibition curated by David Burns and featuring, among others, FBC! gal pal Julie Lequin, while Michael Markowski is also having a solo exhibition (where you will be able, or so I hear, to get his new book).

Meanwhile, if you happen to be in NYC, don't miss the opening at d'Amelio Terras of Tables and Chairs, an all-LA show curated by Jedediah Caesar and Shana Lutker with works by, among others, Vish Jugdeo and Rebecca Morris.

Have fun everybody.

The Fast-Disappearing Bookstores of Los Angeles: Cosmopoiltan Book Shop

SAVE Cosmopolitan!

FBC! Guest contributor Renee Montgomery continues her series of visit to LA's bookstores on the verge of extinction:


Cosmopolitan Books, 7017 Melrose (just east of La Brea), West Hollywood

“Great man. Great book.” Cosmopolitan shop owner Eli Goodman waves The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell at me, “but no one buys it! No one buys books!” 51 years in business. Now going out of business. Being kept alive by orders for 5,000 or 10,000 indiscriminate titles at a time, Eli explains, -- no doubt orders for set decorating purposes.

Top five experiences L.A. will miss with Cosmopolitan’s closing:

1. The serendipitous discovery of first edition treasures, from Aubrey Beardsley to Letters from Laura Ingalls Wilder from San Francisco in 1915, -- not to mention thousands of elusive out-of-prints, and assorted other quirky old tomes. (I recommend for lovers Mary Johnston’s To Have and To Hold, or Sir Walter Scott’s The Castle Dangerous --$5).

2. A Counterculture section that just screams “L.A.”: witchcraft, erotica, Kaballah, Steve Allen, Stella Adler!

3. Cosmopolitan clerk Charles’ personal stories at the drop of a hat – for instance, accounts of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley -- related in his Charming Clerk Charles way.

4. Aging proprietor Eli’s unsteadiness on his feet, bringing down stacks of Modern Library as he trips but still lucid on so many subjects, e.g., Louis l’Amour’s reading habits

5. The most fascinating customers: a dapper elderly gentleman inquiring “Do you have the biography of Farouk I?” Young girls searching through vintage magazines for something?

The last of a dying breed. Cosmopolitan Books. Dusty, yellowed, crammed, cramped, ten foot ladders to heaven-sent shelves. Host a birthday/anniversary/holiday party there. Buy everyone a round of books. Make it a meeting spot for blind dates. Be green there. Be your most stimulating there. C’mon L.A.. s-t-r-e-t-c-h!

[Guest blogger Renee Montgomery works at a large L.A. art museum. She reads about 1 out of every 4 books she buys, but especially the ones on animal husbandry or Native-Americans]

Help Mat Gleason Unload His Warhol-Basquiat Poster!

Just relaying a note I received in my mailbox.
Not that I'm interested myself, but I'd much rather have my readers give a boost to Coagula than, say, link to socks websites and other promotional codes to designer furniture/ knock-offs sites. It's not as if there wasn't enough visual pollution from the Google ads already. Anyway, here below, a plug for a venerable LA art institution (I'm sure the Coagula editors will love being called " a venerable LA art institution", right?).

A note from Coagula Publisher Mat Gleason:

A few years ago, I bought this cool Warhol-Basquiat poster on eBay. I never hung it up, just put it all rolled up on a shelf. It is 9 years later, now I am going thru all my junk and it has a little wrinkle but is otherwise good as brand new. It is a 1999 Tony Shafrazi reprint of the 1985 original, printed on great, thick paper. I bought it on eBay for $150 and I could sell it for that if I wanted to, but I want YOU to have it for free.

I also want you to see the new issue of Coagula Art Journal. After 17 years of being a freely distributed magazine, we have gone print-on-demand. You can download the issue as a pdf file at our http://COAGULA.net website. If you like it, you can buy the color glossy Coagula Art Journal book online as well.

If you want to enter a contest to win my Warhol-Basquiat poster, just download the new issue of Coagula at http://COAGULA.net for free. Your entry has to be in by late July so get the details now. There is NO purchase necessary to win this poster, but I am thinking you might want to buy the print-on-demand issue of Coagula after you check out your free pdf download of issue #98. There is a lot to enjoy in it: our interview of the artist collective Finishing School, art career advice from Alan Bamberger, the continuing saga of life as an artist from Gordy Grundy as well as photos and coverage of the Los Angeles art scene.

This contest is void where prohibited. It is quite simple to enter. Just download our free pdf of issue #98 and look for the contest rules as you catch up on the LowDown on High Art!

Coagula Art Journal Issue #98 now available as a free PDF file download.
http://COAGULA.net

(image shamelessly downloaded from Coagula's website).

Your Social Life This Weekend

Hello dear beloved readers,

Our regular feature "Your Social Life" is returning on FBC!

Not that FBC! herself is going to attend many openings soon (still too tiring for a physically injured Frenchy) but I am slightly better and able to pay attention a little bit more to what's going on in LA.
This weekend there's the Saturday opening of Larry Johnson's retrospective at the Hammer, an artist represented by one of the museum's donors, as well as the opening for the presentation of the collection of Dean Valentine in the same museum. Where he happens to also be a donor and to sit on the Board. It's not a real problem in itself (all museums do that) but it makes me wonder if the Hammer is also hurting financially if it needs to honor its big donors simultaneously, unless there are some scheduling advantages I'm not aware of?
I love Johnson's work but I'm not 100% certain it deserves a retrospective yet. I won't make it to the opening, but I'll try to see the show later and report here.


If you prefer something a bit more funky and less established, you can also go on Saturday night to anotheryearinla where Fallen Free is opening with "Fresh And Easy", and where you can say hi to David and Cathy Stone for me.

The other promising show will open on Sunday at 6 PM at the Glendale College Art Gallery, "Abstractionists Unite!", curated by Nancy Chaikin, with a great line-up that includes FBC! fave Mary Heilmann, as well as Rebecca Morris and Liz Larner (and plenty of others).

Have fun this weekend, and remember to drive responsively and watch out for the stupid LA drivers who don't.

Taschen Warehouse Sale This Weekend

This weekend Taschen is having its semi-annual warehouse sale, books will be 50 to 75% off. Show the world that Los Angeles isn't a city inhabited by illiterate people, and do your patriotic duty by buying books! If you Google "Taschen", you will be aware that "the big penis book" is listed immediately below their URL. I'm not writing this to drive up the blog stats, no, no, no, far from me the idea to use this type of cheap trick and lure casual voyeurs viewers on FBC! I just want to also encourage the workers of the biggest porn industry in the world to join the Culturatti this weekend and buy more books!

Details below:

June 19th – 21st

TASCHEN Hollywood
Farmers Market, 6333 W 3rd St
Clock Tower
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Friday/Saturday 9am -9pm, Sunday 10am-7pm

TASCHEN Beverly Hills
354 N Beverly Dr.
Beverly Hills, CA 90210
Friday/Saturday 10am-7pm, Sunday 12pm-5pm