Richard Paul - Aubergine

The 5-month old Theodore Art Gallery in NYC has recently come under my radar when they exhibited one of my favorite French photographers ever, Eric Poitevin (the other one being Sophie Ristelhueber). Following this exhibition that, alas, I didn't have a chance to see, the owner of the gallery and I started a very enjoyable correspondence. In addition to having impeccable visual taste, she also has a great musical culture, extending from classical to punk to experimental.

The gallery is located in Soho, so, should you find yourself bereft that Jeffrey Deitch has left the neighborhood (just kidding), you know where to find the next generation of the bestest artists there. Ms. Theodore did it again recently by introducing me to the photography of Richard Paul, and after I told her I really liked the picture above, she kindly allowed me to post it to the blog.

Beloved readers, please enjoy Richard Paul, Aubergine. I don't have the date or dimension, which means that if you're in NYC you *have* to drop by Theodore Art and ask about it. It's open on weekends, and as I said, the owner is the loveliest art dealer you could ever meet.

Mercenaries - John Cale Sabotage Live

In the series "FBC! has been way too tame and nice and gentle recently, what with announcing well meaning but totally not radical exhibitions", let's have a total change and present you one of the most amazing song of all time.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Welsh genius John Cale, with "Mercenaries" from the album "Sabotage Live".

Let's forget our friend Tony Hayward for one moment (hi Tony! thanks for providing us with such great entertainment. May you accidentally swallow tar, somehow, and communicate with the birds and nature for once. Feels painful much, uh?) and have a thought for our other friends, the ones working for Halliburton, Blackwater and and I don't what esle.
I'm sure some of them may have a nice art collection. No?

Your Social Life - This week with No Content, Bourgeois Problems, and Departures

In LA this time, though if you are in Santa Fe this weekend you're in for a treat.

There are a few things in Los Angeles to attend this weekend, starting tonight with the book launch of Too Many Billboards at the MAK/Schindler House (scroll down to the bottom of the page for tonight's event information)
This Saturday, don't miss Shana Lutker at Susanne Vielmetter, as well as Andrea Bowers.
Another show with a hoot of a title this time, Bourgeois Problems, at François Ghebaly, curated by Catherine Taft. Right in the same vicinity, do not miss The Mystics Circle at Human Resources.
On Monday, don't miss the kick-off of No Content at LACE, a series of text-events with international writers organized by Les Figues Press, in the context of Public Interest that also includes HollywoodMerchmART! . The latter features work by such luminaries as French artist Matthieu Laurette, Brian Bress or Zoe Crosher. There are tons of things going on at LACE, so please check their website for more complete info.

Closing at Richard Telles this Saturday, Richard Hawkins. Continuing at Michael Maloney, a series of Donald Judd drawings.

Lastly, if you are feeling lazy or not too social this weekend, I recommend you check the new internet documentary series created by KCET, "Departures" with the Venice episode about Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, etc. The entire series more or less retraces the cultural history of Los Angeles' neighborhoods. This is not restricted to visual artists as it includes anybody from a marine biologist, a street peddler, some architects, etc. The producer Justin Cram told me more episodes will be forthcoming, including the Los Angeles River, Watts, Little Tokyo, Silverlake, etc.
And, in this series, to whet your appetite before the John Baldessari retrospective at LACMA, please check this interview the Departures team did with him.

Site Sante Fe - The Dissolve Opens This Week

While the rest of the art world is anxiously waiting for the results of the über-blue chip Basel art fair, and another part of it gets excited at the sycophantic reality show on Bravo featuring a well-known NYC art critic basking in his 5' of fame, The Dissolve opens at Site Sante Fe this weekend. Of all the 3 events I've just mentioned, The Dissolve is the only real art one that I find exciting.

1) it's a real exhibition, curated by people who clearly know what they are doing, Sarah Lewis and Daniel Belasco,
2) not a commercial event where working stiffs/lackeys of the Late Capital try to unload obscenely priced blue chip works to the obscenely rich in search of either status or money-laundering
and
3) not a spectacle destined to humiliate its participants.

The program is exciting enough, featuring such luminaries as Cindy Sherman, Robert Breer, Kara Walker, Raymond Pettibon, etc. but also famed choreographer Bill T. Jones, as well as historical movies by Dziga Vertov, Lotte Reininger, and the Fleischer studios (I surmise their animations) as well as the Edison Manufacturing Company. The list of participants is very tight ("26 works by 30 international artists"), unlike most of the monstrous other biennials where you usually find 250 artists crammed in too many locations for a normal viewer to take it all in. The duration of this 8th Biennial lasts 6 months, another smart choice they make, meaning it leaves time for people not too broke yet to go and travel to Santa Fe. I wish your truly would have an opportunity to go see it.

Please find below the list of artists and an excerpt from the press release. If you can go there... Enjoy!

"Robert Breer, Paul Chan, Martha Colburn, Thomas Demand, Brent Green, George Griffin, Ezra Johnson, Bill T. Jones & OpenEnded Group, William Kentridge, Avish Khebrehzadeh, Laleh Khorramian, Maria Lassnig, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Joshua Mosley, Oscar Muñoz, Jacco Olivier, Raymond Pettibon, Robert Pruitt, Christine Rebet, Mary Reid Kelley, Robin Rhode, Hiraki Sawa, Berni Searle, Cindy Sherman, Federico Solmi, Kara Walker, with historical works by Edison Manufacturing Company, Fleischer Studios, Lotte Reiniger, and Dziga Vertov.

The artists gathered here, working in many mediums, from painting and sculpture to mixed-media installation, alchemically engage with historical models of moving-picture practices. This exhibition displays 26 works by 30 international contemporary artists juxtaposed with four historical animations dating back to the early twentieth century. It is presented through Adjaye Associates' architectural interpretation of the diverse viewing environments of the last hundred years. The result is a visual experience seen through a deliberately bifocal lens, inspired by both contemporary aesthetics and the technical developments of the moving image.

The generative impetus to animate is behind the Biennial's consideration of today's compelling use of technology at the service of the personal touch. What does this new work tell us about technology and that renewable fount of the creative process, the human imagination? Is there another more urgent question behind this new approach? Perhaps it is the search for an authentic voice in the image overload of the Internet and the hand-held that has brought such artists back to an earlier day, when new technology asserted its challenge to the subjective experience of the body. Whatever the impulse, the result is that technology becomes not an end, but a means to more effectively foreground the primacy of the human imagination."

Your Social Life - Unadorned This Week

FBC! is back, but aside from yesterday's outing, not feeling very social (I find schmoozing excruciatingly difficult), so I haven't paid much attention to recent openings. This week it's Memorial Day weekend, where everybody is BBQ-ing something or other, so there aren't that many openings this Saturday. The two worthwhile ones being the group show curated by Michael Ned Holte at Tom Solomon/Cottage Home (please say hi to Tom for me) and the two solo shows openings at Ted Turner.

And while I'm it: dear gallerinas and other art people sending me press releases, if you REALLY read the blog, I'd much rather receive your press releases the very week your show is opening, preferably early in the week, say on a Tuesday. It makes my life easier. remember, FBC! is only a labor of love, your non-existent ads don't pay for nuthin', so I mention you only if I feel like it. Also, I understand you guys not wanting people to grab pics on your website, but please send one or two pics attached to your release. It pains me when I want to feature an upcoming show and I have no picture to post.
Thank you.

Mike Kelley And Michael Smith, A Voyage of Growth and Discovery

Last night was the opening of the West Coast incarnation of Mike Kelley and Michael Smith's A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, initially presented at the Long Island Sculpture Center in NY last year.
Being a big fan of both artists, FBC! couldn't miss Kelley's first big solo show in LA since 2001, and Michael Smith's first ever (? not sure about that one, couldn't somebody bring his retrospective to SoCal, dammit?). The LA stop was held, through West of Rome Public Art organization, at Mike Kelley's current studio, the Farley Building in Eagle Rock.

A Voyage of Growth and Discovery (henceforth known as AVOGAD) could be aptly subtitled "Michael Smith does Burning Man" as, according to the press release: "The two-and-a-half hour, six-channel video component of A Voyage of Growth and Discovery follows the existential journey of Baby Ikki, a character conceived and portrayed by Michael Smith, as he wanders through an annual art event and temporary community based on radical self expression and self-reliance in Nevada's remote Black Rock Desert. The installation evokes the festival's fantasy-like environment, which is both folksy and grand—a mixture of fairground, playground, hippie commune, and the futuristic architectural aesthetic of R. Buckminster Fuller."




The collaboration between the two artists is successful as it nicely blends both the style and vocabulary of its creators, without any one of them overwhelming the personality of the other, while maintaining distinctive voices.
For example, Smith's trademark performative video work is the narrative that binds the sculpture display together, with the presence of his usual themes of learning experiences or achieving some sort of educational progress through various absurd encounters with the vernacular.
Meanwhile, Kelley's visual tropes are disseminated throughout the installation, from the stuffed animals to the tubular steel frames seen previously in Test Room, for example, while the all encompassing music serves to unify the experience.
It's not surprising both artists' sensibilities blend so well, given that they share, among many things, a background in performance and a deep interest in the flaws of contemporary educational system. In addition to the same fist name. There's even somewhere a common interview they did in the 1980s, called "Mike talks to Mike about Mike", which FBC! owns somewhere deep in the But Chic! archives vault, but I can't remember exactly where, so no unearthing for you. Just move off your lazy bums and find it for yourselves, OK?




The opening was packed, with lots of LA artists and former students of Kelley , such as Ivan Morley, Stephanie Taylor, Jennifer Moon, Will Fowler, Lisa Lapinski, writers who specialized in Kelley's work like John Welchman, former and current collaborators of his like Anita Pace and Scott Benzel, as well as Kelley's most devoted collectors Kourosh Larizadeh and Luis Pardo, art dealer Tom Solomon, and plenty of other people I have missed (hey, it was dark and crowded in there!).

Aside from the nice reunion feel of the event, and the pleasure to finally see Mike Kelley and Michael Smith in Los Angeles, the whole installation/exhibition merits more than a cursory review, and I sure hope to come back several times to see it better. For one thing, I'd love to see the entire video cycle, not only because I would like to really "follow" the narrative, inasmuch there is something to follow in it, but because several passages I've spotted were downright beautiful. I know "beautiful" isn't an adjective often used in conjunction with both Kelley and Smith's work, but get over it people, there is plenty of beauty in this show. From the fireworks display in the video to the lights and shadows in the physical installation.
Scott Benzel obligingly told me the artists were working on single-channel version of it, something I'm looking forward to.




What I liked very much was the cohesive aspect of the show, which in this respect I liked much better than Kelley's previous monumental masterpiece's Day Is Done. There are lots of things spawning from Day Is Done in AVOGAD, such as the use of integrated video narratives within the sculpture/installation (video narratives with a heavy content, as opposed to, say, Pipilotti Rist's lightweight use of same formal device in her work), the concatenation of several themes and time-based recorded events in a single video subsequently presented on split screens and non-successive time frames, the circuitous path the viewer is instinctively invited to take to embrace the show, the use of sound and music, etc.

But unlike Day Is Done, AVOGAD's structure is much simpler, down to the skeleton aspect of the sculptures, the circuit is really circular, and if the interest in the vernacular that marks Kelley and Smith's work is underlined, it is in aspects of the vernacular that are easy to grasp for the viewer (Fuller's geodomes, the Burning Man theme, the VW wagon, etc). Speaking of which, someone familiar with Kelley's work will have fun spotting little details, like the blankets at the bottom of one sculpture reminiscent of work he has done in From My Institution To Yours or Proposal For the Decoration of An Island Of Conference Rooms (With Copy Room" For An Advertising Agency Designed By Frank Gehry, etc.




In this sense, Kelley seems pretty much liberated from all the interpretative crap about childhood trauma hurled at his work in the 1990s, as if the impressive body of work he has done since then has finally allowed the viewers to see his use of stuffed animals and blankets for what it is, visual vocabulary. Also, unlike Kelley's previous works, probably because of the collaboration with Smith, the content of the piece is not as archeologically layered as in Day Is Done, making the whole experience far less overwhelming and much simpler to comprehend, not mentioning very funny, since both artists are well-known for their humor.

There would be much more to say about the show, but as I only was there for about an hour, in the company of hundreds of other people, I can only invite you to go see it for yourself.
There was an aura of pure happiness in the Farley Building last night, everybody seemed to enjoy the show tremendously and have a blast. Most of the conversations I've seen were punctuated by people spacing out from the discussion to look at the work, look, and look; and everybody stated "I HAVE to come back". Lots of children around, who had the fun of their life. Yes, people, you can take your kids. They will thank you when they are grown ups.



Mike Kelley & Michael Smith "A voyage of growth and discovery"
at the Farley Building
1669 Colorado Boulevard
Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, CA 90041-1435
Admission is free
For more information visit www.westofrome.org

There is a CDs, "Dance Beats For Baby", a collaboration between Mike Kelley and Scott Benzel, with vocals by Michael Smith, issued by Compound Annex. "It melts in your mind, not in your hand".

Away

There has been an unexpected death in my family this week. I will be flying back for the funeral, therefore FBC! will be closed until after I get back.

Please attend Meight Day at LAXart on Saturday, and have a thought for me. Thanks.