A Is For Zebra - Charles White Elementary School

 Stripsody, cartoon onomatopeas sung by Cathy Berberian

This Fall in Los Angeles, there's the mammoth series of exhibitions organized under the aegis of the Getty for Pacific Standard Times (PST), and there are all the other shows loosely disarranged under the imaginary heading "life continues". A pretty remarkable one such show right now, A Is For Zebra, was organized by José-Luis Blondet for LACMA at  the Charles White Elementary School near McArthur Park.

 The exhibition is open to everybody but is really meant for the school children at CWE,  who were having a ball (and a great one at that!) during the opening. Where hot chocolate, cookies and ice cream sundaes were served, something LACMA should do at all their openings, I think (hint, hint).
How better to learn the joys of reading but to see how artists have been having fun with language and the alphabet, whether in videos, artist books, cartoon form, opera singing, experimental music, sculpture or installation?

Stephanie Taylor devised a charming story based on a character whose name is derived from 'Los Angeles", and which by sound association becomes some absurd anglophile narrative*. Her installation featured several objects associated with London, and a soundtrack that I unfortunately didn't manage to hear (they were many children having the fun of their life there!)

 One of the great things in the partnership of LAUSD & LACMA for the school is how works from the permanent collection are being brought to the school. Here's John Baldessari How To Teach A Plant The Alphabet. Proof that conceptual art doesn't have to be dreadfully dry, it can be fun and playful, too.

Because Charles White Elementary is located near McArthur Park, its students tend to be bilingual. A really fun thing in the show was that the didactics were printed in 2 colors, so to read them you had to wear a cool-looking pair of cardboard glasses with color-coded lenses, depending on whether you wanted to read them in English, Spanish, or both. Look how incredibly stylish these cute kids are wearing those glasses. It was really fun seeing kids alternating between 2 pairs of glasses to read both languages.

Stephanie Taylor in front of Mel Bochner's Language Is Not Transparent.

A Is For Zebra is a really fun show to take your children to if you have some, but even if you don't have any it's an interesting and intelligent exhibition to visit, with some incredible historical prints from LACMA's collection (Goya), in addition to the works shown above. And since the exhibition is meant for children to enjoy and have fun with, it's also not overwhelmingly dense. It's a nice alternative to the humongous PST shows if you wish to see some very good art but don't have the energy to tackle a gigantic museum historical exhibition.

*apologies for the picture being on its side. I have a new photo software that I don't master yet.

Mark Dutcher At Latned Astär

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure to see Mark Dutcher's very intelligent exhibition at Dental Rasta spelled backwards + umlaut (Latned Astär for those of you who, like me, would prefer if the place was really called Dental Rasta).  It's over now, so here are a few pictures for your viewing pleasure.

 Mark Dutcher likes his surfaces rough and doesn't care for the preciousness of framing or anything that makes painting too remote and untouchable for the viewer. Many of the paintings and drawings in the show were on cardboard,  in this instance stapled directly to the wall. You could see this as just a textural effect, or if you're me as a social commentary on where art is at its most alive, i.e. in artist-run spaces outside of the commercial arenas where Artforum.com 'social diary would want make you to believe things happen.

This is a frontal view of the first room. The large striped and layered piece in the back is made on cardboard packaging coming from Fine Art Stretcher Bars, on which are quite a few felt tip graffiti drawings and sentences made by artists Juan Capistran and Eamon Ore-Giron, so it's a collaborative piece, if you will, anchored in local Los Angeles art community practice. The layered humble material is here to counteract the outwardly minimalist aspect of the stripes, and the graffiti add a humorous take on Dutcher's careful meditation upon a modernist vocabulary that isn't so much quoted as simply dealt with a gritty series of painterly hand gestures.

Dutcher's work could at first glance seem deliberately abstract, but if you pay attention it rapidly emerges that he uses a lot of symbols, many of them with historical resonance such as the pink triangle the Nazis used to force homosexuals to wear,  and later on appropriated by Act-Up and the gay community during the heartbreaking years of the Aids epidemic.

While Dutcher was working on the paintings and drawings of his exhibition, he was listening to a lot of music, including Joy Division's Decades whose chorus "Where Have They Been?" served as a reminder of all the loved ones lost to the Aids epidemic.  Some of the lyrics are inscribed on the wax paintings like this one. I tried to take a close-up but it came out all blurry, so you have to trust me on that one.

This last painting gives you an idea about the way Dutcher is interested in creating surface and texture variation in his paintings. I particularly like this one because under the sophisticated, unified silver layer of glitter you see those crude symbols made I suppose with either cardboard of construction paper, and the contradiction of the two processes make the final object look like a very ancient, primitive archeological artifact or like an extraterrestrial, indecipherable object sent to us by an advanced life form.

We're Vaguely Baaaaaaaack

above, John Cale, Catastrofuk

Hello, beloved and cherished and thinning readership!

I hope you had a great time during FBC!'s latest hiatus. I've been asked yesterday what was going on with FBC! (Hi Jennifer!) to which I answered "nothing". Basically yours truly has been on a lot of deadlines over the last few months, then traveling a lot, then getting rather sick. The "meeting deadlines" and "traveling" were art-related, for some forthcoming publications, etc. but I in fact have seen very little art since the beginning of the Fall opening season in September. For one thing, I've missed all of the PST-related events here in Los Angeles, and I do intend to go see Under The Big Black Sun at MOCA, the shows at the Getty and LACMA, and also the Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken shows before I travel again in late December. If I have the time I'll write some recension of the shows, but I am currently drowning in paperwork so we'll see.
I shouldn't even be writing this post, but I haven't written anything since mid-October and I'm starting to miss it. It's likely I won't resume any Your Social Life posts until early next year, if only because this blog is an unpaid labor of love and I'm starting to have trouble to keep up. I mean, I just have to turn my back 5 minutes and twenty new galleries pop up in LA (while a dozen other close or merge).

So,  I haven't seen much in Los Angeles recently except the opening yesterday at anotheryearinla, You Are Me which could be relabeled "Stephen Kaltenbach and friends". As you may know I am a HUGE fan of Kaltenbach's work, and the show last night was a mini-survey of sort of his early work, with other lovely works by, among others, Cathy Stone,  David Stone, Peter Coffin, Mark Rodriguez, etc.  I forgot to take my camera with me, so you'll have to trust me on that, but it is a lovely, lovely show of conceptual art that underscores the humor at play in Kaltenbach's work (and the others). Don't miss it!

Outside of LA the only art I've seen was at the Tate Modern where I had the luck to see the Gerhard Richter retrospective, as well as the very beautiful Tacita Dean film in the Hall of Turbines.
A Gerhard Richter retrospective looks like another Richter retrospective, that is a beautiful winner, but if you've seen a half dozen already like I've done, there won't be anything much new save for the white abstract paintings, which are as gorgeous as the gray ones. But, you know, he hasn't started making ugly, "Picasso-at-Vallauris-rediscovered-60-years-later"  vaguely figurative paintings, he's still the supra elegant Richter of old.
The Tacita Dean movie was very short, very beautiful, and also basking in nostalgia. Her struggle to find 16 mm film is well-documented, so I won't say much about that. The movie itself I thought was yearning for the golden age of experimental cinema, and even included the clichéed shot of a moving escalator. It was all about a descending movement (waterfalls, etc) and a little bit sad, with references to modernist images (I thought a bit about Rodchenko). What really struck me when I watched it was the very peaceful atmosphere inside the Hall of Turbines, and the very sweet,  smothered atmospheric quality of the acoustics therein. There's a certain softness to the way sounds don't reverberate much inside such an enormous  and crowded space, which made me think about how interesting it might be (or maybe too challenging?) for composers or musicians to stage something there. Maybe Tate Modern should commission some composers to do live events there? Have they done it already?

The other art I've seen was at the FIAC art fair in Paris, a fair I remembered as really provincial when I was living in France and which has come a long, long way since then. It is now very blue chip, with many NYC galleries (Metro Pictures, Paula Cooper, Chaim & Reid, etc), a few LA ones  like Marc Foxx, etc. I was delighted to see some Analia Sabans at my old friends Praz-Delavallade, and some beautiful Matthew Brannons at a Belgian gallery named after a Matta-Clark piece, Office Baroque. But, aside from this, it's just yet another art fair.

Outside of the art stuff, I also went to two concerts while I was away, and missed another one by The Monochrome Set, because the suburban venue that hosted it moved their gig back to midnight, knowing full well the last subway was at 1.15 AM, and yours truly had to get up at 5 AM to catch the Eurostar to London, so alas it was not meant to be. I'm very happy to hear that they will likely tour in NYC and LA next year, hopefully I won't be traveling when this happens.
The two concerts I went to were John Cale in my hometown, and Pat Fish at the 12 Bar Club in London. I was delighted that Cale played in my hometown, as you would imagine,  but after what happened there I'd be ready to bet he will never, ever play again in Caen.

The thing that first disappointed me was that the venue didn't advertize at all for the concert, no posters, no nothing, no more than one reminder on their Facebook page, not even on the morning of the concert. This, in a  (very provincial) city that boast  of an independent rock radio station (which didn't do much itself in terms of John Cale airplay before the concert, though I may be a bit unfair there because I didn't listen to much radio during the 4 days I was there). Cale played two sold-out dates in Paris in the following 2 weeks, and my hometown is only a 2 hours train ride from Paris, so a bit of advertisement wouldn't have hurt the venue.

Anyway,  in the afternoon before the concert I had the great pleasure of meeting Cale's drummer, the very talented Michael Jerome Moore, who's also a very cool guy in person. It was very gracious of him to spend an hour with me, when he could have had a nap instead, since Cale and his band had spent the night on their bus traveling to my hometown. It was also a bit surreal because Michael and I live in the same city, so it was strange meeting in the small town where I grew up. And where, in my youth,  could have never imagined Cale to play.

That evening, only 150 people had come to the concert. Before Cale and his band came onstage, the local contemporary art center had Guitar Drag projected in the adjoining room, a video by Christian Marclay that is far more superior, IMHO, to The Clock. I overheard a couple of dickheads saying "Oh, contemporary art is so lame, and it cost millions". Fuck you, dickheads, and shitty hometown, I know why I have left you forever.  You sure don't deserve John Cale.
Cale came on stage with his band, and despite the small audience proceeded to deliver an extraordinarily good gig, the second best of his I've seen (best one was Paris 1919 at Royce Hall last year) out of 4, with an incredibly varied set list that mixed old songs ("Big White Cloud", "Captain Hook") and the newest ones from his last EP, (available in the US on CD on Black Friday) as well as that charming and funny oddity, "Satellite Walk".
He seemed to have tons of fun on stage, told us he did, came back for an encore (Chorale, one hell of a beautiful song), and came back after the encore to inform us that while he was playing, someone had stolen his computer and phone from the dressing room. Apparently "someone" had forgotten to lock a back door, which, given the amount of security guards at the venue sounds like a load of bullshit to me, so my money's on a couple of assholes working at the venue taking advantage of their cushy, local-government-supported jobs to rob Cale blind and take off with his possessions (and his manager's). Of course the local police hasn't recovered anything, not a surprise given how they recruit their best and brightest in my home country (you don't need to even have finished middle school!).
I was so very sorry and still am that this is the way some goonies chose to welcome Cale in my hometown. May the Holy Mother of Belphégor punish them with anal cancer and much worse, and my most sincere apologies to Cale and his manager for what these people have done to them.




Later on, I missed The Monochrome Set in Paris, but was rewarded with the very lovely Pat Fish in London, who did a really good short solo gig,  playing some of his own songs,  some covers including one of Max Eider's, and played the song  I was listening to when my train was coming in St. Pancras that very morning, Shirley MacLaine. I owed the gentleman a beer, so I had the pleasure to meet him after his set. I was very shy, so apologies to Mr. Fish for my lame conversation, but really it was lovely to meet him. I recommend my wide and varied readership to hunt down some Jazz Butcher, Wilson and Pat Fish songs and better yet, buy his music and go see him play live whenever possible.



Lastly, this weekend in Los Angeles there are lots of openings, as usual, and I'll miss all of them because I'll be at the Great LA Walk trying to cover the almost 20 miles from downtown to the sea, as I do every year. If I weren't,  the one and only opening I'd attend tomorrow would be the Destroy All Monsters one, so if you go, please pass on my regards to Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw.
Have fun everybody, and thanks for following FBC!

I Survived Openingeddon In Culver City And All I Got Was This (Not) Lousy T-Shirt

Howdy readers!

I know it's been a while and this year has been spottier than usual in regard to FBC!'s posting  regularity. And it will keep on that way, as I've had a few more deadlines to meet, all of the writing kind, and a few more coming up, in addition to tons of travel.
 So, until early November at best there won't be too many "Your Social Life" postings even, also because we're very lucky in Los Angeles to finally have a series of shows (Pacific Standard Times) celebrating the dynamic visual arts output of our fair city, under the aegis of the Getty Center. You can learn all about it here for what's happening at the Getty itself and here for everything that happens elsewhere. I think there are about 800 exhibitions and events and the likelihood of anybody to see everything, save for the LAT art critics, is pretty low.  And the likelihood of my unpaid self to actually announcing them is even lower.

I only have one reservation about the whole enterprise, it's that the time frame chosen runs from 1945 to 1980, missing the crucial art historical period that comes after the rise of Cal Arts* as the premier international art school in the United States and marks the influence of its alumni on the international art scene, and therefore on international art history.
This being said, knowing that there are already hundreds of shows coming up, I cannot see how a 1980-2005 period would have made the  whole organization manageable, so I just hope that in about 5/7 years, there will be a "Pacific Standard Time II - 1980-2005" to show how Los Angeles saw how art production quality, as a whole, shifted from NYC to here (the market itself is still in NYC). Hint, hint.

One original thing about the Pacific Standard Times operation is that private, commercial galleries are associated with it  in addition to non-profits, and made an effort to show  artists active in LA during the time period considered. Last week marked the Fall openings extravaganza in Culver City, where  if you take aside the ridiculous starfucker events like  Kaws at Honor Fraser and Moby at Paul Kopeikin (and I have to say, Moby at least is a decent C+ artist whereas Kaws is an aberration who should stick to hip-hop or whatever else he does that makes him a D+ celebrity), some unusually strong shows were up, in no small part because of PST.
I wanted to take some pictures of the art, but there were too many people around, so I'm just going to report on the few things I managed to see.

- Shows I didn't manage to see: Richard Jackson at Kordansky, Matt Johnson at Blum & Poe, Joel Kyack at François Ghebaly. I need to go back to  see all of these.

- Show I wished I could like but was too folky for my taste: Betye Saar. The loveliest crowd was at Roberts & Tilton, I wished I could have stayed there forever.

- Shows I really liked but wish I could have seen  them without anybody in front of the art: John Outterbridge at LAXart, and the group show at the new Nye and Brown gallery.  I spotted a Chris Burden here, a Craig Kauffman there, a Peter Alexander elsewhere, and FBC!'s favorite LA artist Juan Capistran was in it, except his work was drowned by a live band playing in the gallery. Normally I love music, but that band within an already crowded group show was a bad idea in space management.

- Show I went to but didn't manage to see any artwork in, it was so crowded: at Cherry & Martin. I understand it is a reconstitution of a well-known 1970s (?) group show with maybe 17 out of the 19 (?) original artists, but there were so many people schmoozing around I didn't get to have a view of any artwork.

- Show whose  first 1/2 I liked but not the other 1/2: Eric Wesley at China Art Objects. In passing, CAO had the best Summer show in Culver City this year, with a lovely painting show that was almost blue chip, it was so strong.

- show by Charles Gaines I liked but wasn't his strongest to date, but I don't care because he's Charles Gaines: Charles Gaines at Vielmetter. Did I mention he's Charles Gaines? He's like John Cale in this regard, even his not-so-strong-for-Charles-Gaines-works are stronger than anybody else in general. If you don't like Charles Gaines' work, what can I say, except you should consider getting a brain and eyes transplant in the near future.

- the tightest, smartest, strongest show I've seen last weekend: Amir Zaki, John Divola and Judy Fiskin at Angles.  You should get yourself there, and if you have money, invest in any of those three artists. Also, if you love me, my birthday is in April and I could do nicely with a Judy Fiskin print, thank you.

- longest bathroom line ever at the Mandrake, with a steady stream of hot, surgically enhanced douchebaguettes™ waiting to either barf or do something else that morals reprove in the Ladies cubicle. The women who really needed to pee were lining up at the Gents bathroom, and I can confirm to you, incredulous readership, that the men's restroom at the Mandrake is totally gross. Maybe not always gross, but during Openingeddon it's, urgh.

- what makes me really angry at starfucker shows, aside from the fact that the art sucks: all the douchebags and douchebaguettes™ in Culver City last week were of the type that easily drops 5K on plastic surgery, $450 on shoes and $500 in designer jeans, and I'm not talking about what they drive (speaking of, it seems that Bentley is overtaking Porsche as the douchebag ride of choice this year). And yet they would never, ever buy a Judy Fiskin print that is 1/2 of their monthly plastic surgery budget, is beautiful, smart, and historical.
So this is why Los Angeles is not going to overtake NYC as the art market capital of the world anytime soon. Not because we don't have enough good artists (we have hundreds) nor good galleries (we have maybe a dozen good ones, an another dozen OK ones) but because here we don't have enough real, good collectors who take the time  to inform themselves and not buy into the hype. I don't care how pretty or hot or successful you are, if you can drop money on plastic surgery and/or a fancy ride, you can easily buy very good art by very good artists in very good galleries, instead of fueling the stupid celebrity culture that shows such as Kaws embody.

And that's all for last week.

Now this week is Openingeddon in Chinatown, where luckily there won't be any starfucker show so the douchebags and douchebaguettes quotient invading our local art galleries should be much lower.  Don't miss the show at Charlie James and there's also Alexis Smith at Tom Solomon.

Lastly, what about the lousy T-Shirt? Well, it's in fact a great-looking T-Shirt you can buy here. Mine arrived this morning and fits really well (it's slimming, actually, weirdly enough because it's made by American Apparel in a vertically blah-bah-blah in downtown LA), but it came with a small tear. So I'm going to pretend it's a homage to John Cale's influence on Punk rock and it's culture and wear it proudly, while waiting for his new 5-tracks EP to arrive through the mail soon.

(pic: from Domino Records website)




* Of course other art schools such as Otis, UCLA, Art Center College of Design, and more recently UCI and USC made Los Angeles the best city in the country to study art nowadays, but it's really Cal Arts in the late 1970s, early 1980s that made the rest of the world aware of this fact,

The Fall - Cab It Up

Howdy,  beloved readers!

I bet you were anxiously awaiting the next installment of our The Fall series, you know, to occupy agreeably the Summer? Like John Cale, it's hard to pick up a song as there are so many good ones (and let's be fair, a few duds, exactly like Cale). One of my favorite The Fall album is I Am Kurious Oranj, and I was hesitating between the quasi eponymous song, Kurious Oranj, and Cab It Up. Cab It Up won, if only because I believe I might have posted Kurious Oranj on the blog already maybe 2 years ago (?). I Am Kurious Oranj came out in 1988, about the same year as The Frenz Experiment, and is the result of a collaboration with avant-garde choreographer Michael Clark - another thing in common with John Cale who has written ballet music.
There's something hysterically energetic about Cab It Up,  uplifting even, so it's perfectly appropriate as a Sunday evening song to help you deal with tomorrow's bad case of the Mondays (you will just have to play the song again, duh).
Beloved readership, enjoy Mark E. Smith & band's genius, and Cab It Up!

Who Makes The Nazis? An Important Question Asked By The Fall

Howdy, beloved readership!

Yes. I know. I'm only here intermittently. What can I say? It's the Summer. The world is going batshit crazy (and that's the understatement of the week) and as you should have noticed by now, art isn't going to change it. If you seriously believe that art is going to change the world, I strongly suggest you go try and apply those world-changing art skills to abet the Tea Partiers of the universe, so to neutralize their noxious effects.*

Not that yours truly doesn't believe in the arts anymore, if you ask me, they are the only reason left for living.  So I'm going to try and swallow the art pill tonight to see a bunch of friends at the Beacon Arts Building and optimistically attend the opening of The Optimist Parking Lot.
And right after this, I'm going to something I was totally unaware of, Stan Ridgway and Michelle Shocked giving a free concert in Pershing Square, thanks to the generosity of the LA Parks & Recreation Department, and of taxpayers like you (and I). Yours truly is a big believer in the LA P&R Dept. that keeps our public swimming pools open(only $2 if you have a library card) and not only this, but if you contact them with a question, they get back to you within 24 hours. So I'm mightily pleased they have this series of free concerts in Pershing Square in the Summer, I only wish I had known about it sooner.

Who knows? Next year they may program Sparks or John Cale or the Melvins?
Meanwhile, I'm leaving you with the immense Mark E. Smith and the Fall, to ask yourself the question: who makes the nazis?



*If you understand what I meant by this sentence, you've just earned FBC!'s begrudging admiration.

The Fall - Hit The North!

Let's continue our The Fall Summer series  with Hit The North! One of my favorite Fall songs, from 1987 (I think).
Not much more to say these days, I'm busy elsewhere AND the internet connection here at the FBC! Worldwide Headquarters keeps on breaking up.
So, enjoy your Summer and Hit The North!