Courtesy the artist

Jon Bernad's photograph of Tula (Museum of Jurassic Technology)

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The Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) in Culver City has a permanent exhibit devoted to the Sputnik space dogs, dogs found on Moscow streets, trained, dressed in dog-sized space suits then sent into orbit by the Soviet space program late in the 1950s and early in the 1960s. The exhibit features close-to-life oil paintings of the five who never returned and, if you've been there, you know the corridor they're hung is eerie. The dogs seem to glow but everything else is dim.

When Jon Bernad visited a few years ago and entered the corridor, he was taken aback by the figure of an actual dog coming toward him. "I think it's Werner Herzog who talks about coming over a hill and seeing windmills and not even understanding what he's seeing," says Bernad. He felt like that and wasn't sure the dog was real at first. She is, she's named Tula, and Bernad has been back to the MJT a few times since to see her. A few months ago, he took a photograph of her, lying still with legs sprawled below the depictions of the disappeared Sputnik dogs. It's now part of Bernad's growing Art Dogs series, portraits of dogs who spend their lives around art.

Bernad's project officially began this past summer when he launched the Art Dogs tumblr, but he started noticing dogs who live with art almost as soon as he started visiting L.A. galleries and museums circa 2007. Then, he had just moved to L.A., his full time job was to keep two French bulldogs company and he had just befriended French curator Isabelle Le Normand. They were learning to navigate the city together. The dogs were familiar when the rest of the art world wasn't.

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Photo: Jennifer Swann

Eunice Luk at L.A. Art Book Fair

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Last weekend's first annual L.A. Art Book Fair brought more than 200 independent publishers, galleries and booksellers from more than 20 countries to the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA to talk art, hock prints and sell books. When we visited on Saturday, the massive Little Tokyo space was bustling with food trucks, author and artist talks and book signings from Ben Jones, Steve Roden, Dan Colen, Harmony Korine and others.

Amidst the noisy chaos of a couple thousand artists and zine zealots from L.A. and around the world, we rounded up the best things we heard all weekend, including quotes from panelists and fair-goers alike.

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Ceci N'est Pas

Alexandra Grant's work in the window of Here is Elsewhere gallery opening night of "Ma Prochain La Vie", a three-location show Isabelle Le Normand curated with Jon Bernad

Last week, New York-based, French artist Davide Balula picked the lock of Hammer curatorial associate Elizabeth Cline's house while a small crowd stood by. Paris-based artist Michel Blazy, or his proxies, cut the lawn of L.A. collector Danny First and affixed the loose, cut-off grass to the wall of a small room at First's house. In addition, seven Paris galleries, most of which had never exhibited there, had booths at Art Los Angeles Contemporary, the fair at Barker Hangar.

All of this fell under the umbrella of Ceci N'est Pas, a five-month initiative organized by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S., funded by the Institut Francais (the French government's cultural arm) and meant to bring Paris and Los Angeles artists together. French curator Isabelle Le Normand, who has spent the last five years finding and sometimes creating Paris-L.A. convergences, had a hand in at least a third of the week's events.

Le Normand came to Los Angeles for the first time in 2007, looking for an art internship. She had reserved a rental car. But spread-out, segmented LAX confused her, and since she never found the car, she took the bus instead. Because she did, she met Jon Bernad, who noticed her putting a twenty dollar bill into the unsophisticated Metro ticket dispenser and advised she use smaller bills in the future.

A recent college graduate, he had just moved to L.A. to live in a traveling movie producer's back house and care for two French bulldogs (an arrangement that was supposed to last two months but ended up lasting six years). "I had all this free time, " he remembers. He had been using it to explore the city. "I wanted to share the experience." He helped Le Normand navigate on that first visit and then again on visits to come.

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Photo by Joshua White, courtesy Honor Fraser Gallery

Mario Ybarra Jr.'s porcelain sculpture, Mr. Hyde... (2013)

This week, one artist reimagines Michael Jackson's Thriller, another puts the visions of a '70s revolutionary to music and a new film tells the story of a restaurant-running SoCal commune.

5. Panther politics remix
Pictures of Huey P. Newton, the activist who co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966, with his tilted beret, leather jacket and firearm across his chest, make him look severe and single-minded. But hear recordings of his voice and it's soft and careful. He rarely talks about himself -- he's always speaking about groups: "white America," "people of color all over the world." Artist Steffani Jemison gets at Newton's careful generalities in a quirky way in her installation at LAXART. She enlisted adventurous R&B trio Sidetrack Boyz to musically improvise a 1970 speech by Newton, one in which he talks a lot about change that's coming soon. Abstract black paintings on clear paper hang in the gallery, while the trio's voices start, stop, then start again, never hurried. 2640 S. La Cienega Blvd.; through Feb. 23. (323) 868-5893, laxart.org.

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L.J. Williamson

See More: Our full gallery of pictures from Burning Man Decompression by CuriousJosh.

Thumping EDM? Check. Lasers? Check. Fishnets and booty shorts? Check.

Now that we've got that out of the way, we can get on with what the more ambitious scope of the L.A. Burning Man community's goals, achieved through its big fat Decompression event, which was held at Los Angeles State Historic Park on Saturday.

The wildly overgrown desert rave that is Burning Man runs on a philosophy that could be described as "principled partying." Sure, there are plenty of Burners that are there just for the wild bacchanal, plenty that are there for the art, but in the more high-minded corners of the event, taking a piece of the more transcendent aspects of the experience home with you is the crucial goal.

In that spirit, Decompression is a one-night slice of Burning Man, minus the 12-hour drive and the $390 entry ticket. Originally designed as a chance for Burners to "decompress" -- to more slowly ease their way back into the default world after a week at the all-encompassing desert fest -- the Los Angeles event now is well on its way to becoming an end in itself.

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Tanja M. Laden

Voila! Art for the Modern Eye

A peek inside this weekend's 17th annual Los Angeles Antiques Art + Design Show, which runs through Sunday, should be enough to convince anyone that there really is such a thing as the 1 percent, because those of us covering the opening-night party at Santa Monica's Barker Hangar clearly weren't among the so-called elite. Luckily, it benefited LACMA's Decorative Arts and Design Council, so it was a little easier to overlook the ridiculously astronomical sums on most of the items, especially considering this is in fact what the LACMA council is all about: the appreciation of good design, which doesn't always come at a low price.

Likewise, even on (dare we say it?) eBay, the word "antique" almost always means "pricey," so it should come as no surprise that the fair is organized by the Antiques Dealers Association of California. With museum-quality items, it's usually acceptable for price tags to reflect five-figure sums, and these dealers obviously need to make a living. But no one should have to pay vastly inflated amounts for items that are meant to furnish and decorate such a personal and sacred space as the home. Yes, good design isn't always cheap, but a sofa shouldn't cost $22,000, either. It just shouldn't.

With this in mind, here are a few things we'd buy if we had a limitless budget, a massive amount of storage space and if we weren't actually part of the 99 percent.

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Gretchen Ryan, courtesy of Fred Torres Collaborations

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*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week

This past weekend's Art Platform Los Angeles art fair turned out pretty well, despite some trepidation that its move from last year's popular inauguration at Downtown's LA Mart to the usual art-fair suspect of Santa Monica Airport's Barker Hangar would render it indistinguishable from the others.

The general opinion was that APLA organizers worked wonders with the venue. A change of entrance that reconfigured the welcome area into a breezy sculpture garden and lounge, as well as the occupation of two separate buildings and creative use of the rear tarmac, made the experience fresh, new and breezy from the get-go.

Inside, an impressive range of galleries was diverse in terms of genre, style, and internationalism (Street Art! Not one but two Istanbul galleries! Installation! Performance!). The selection of local galleries was also itself eclectic, with stalwarts and indie outfits represented on equal footing.

Random polling revealed a sense that the quality of the art was "uneven" but that is par-for-the-art-fair course, and on balance the exhibited work was notable for its inclusion of younger, riskier artists and a near-total lack of Warhols.

Here are 10 great artworks from the fair, in no particular order:

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Wendy Gilmartin

Artist Benjamin Scharf's POD

At its 7th annual art walk Saturday, Frogtown and the Elysian Valley Arts Collective invited groups of artists, designers and vendors to re-imagine and re-engineer 8 pre-fabricated storage "PODs" as exhibition spaces intermixed within the warehouses, riverfront, tight-knit single family homes, community gardens and art studios in the neighborhood.

Organizer and architect Tracy Stone, whose design offices are in Frogtown, says, "Our goal was to increase the number of artists at the walk, but also infill the walk with exhibitors so that there wasn't as much blank space between the studios and other workspaces, and the neighborhood."

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Micah Levin

Sheila Malone, Gwynn Shanks and Cecilie Madsen performing in Simply Knot at INSTALL: WeHo

As quickly as it appeared, it was gone again. On Sunday, the El Tovar parking lot in West Hollywood was transformed for twenty four hours into INSTALL: WeHo, a pop-up, interactive art festival highlighting emerging LGBTQ artists in Los Angeles. Conceived by openly gay performance artist Mark Cramer, this exhibition served as a forum for the stories, struggles, and spirit of the gay community at large via a diverse array of mediums.

"Artists are historians," Cramer explained during an a post-event interview. "We're at a critical point for the gay civil rights movement and highlighting the work of those who have and continue to experience it is invaluable. L.A. is one of the focal points of this movement. We walk on these streets everyday, contribute to society, are expected to maintain social norms and practices, yet we are denied fundamental human rights. Having an LGBTQ art show in L.A. allows us to take an emotional, political and personal snap shot of this struggle."

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© 2012 Susan Sanchez Photography

Franki Elliot

While the Hammer Museum debuted the Venice Beach Biennial as part of the museum's "Made in L.A." exhibit this past weekend, Chicago-based Franki Elliot jostled for a spot on the Venice Boardwalk in order to collect material for her own project, Typewriter Stories.

Saturday afternoon, the 20-something writer searched for a place to set up camp among a group of territorial local vendors and award-winning L.A. artists. She finally settled into a space near Muscle Beach, where she sat cross-legged on the ground with her vintage portable typewriter, nestled between a man who made cardboard signs and a henna-tattoo artist.

Less than a year after indie publisher Curbside Splendor printed her first book, Piano Rats, Elliot is spending the summer in Los Angeles to compose free-form verse on her 1960s Smith Corona Corsair Deluxe. Saturday was the first time she brought her "live typewriting" to a city outside Chicago. Along with a crowd of tourists, artists and other writers, Elliot attracted kids who'd never seen this odd-looking analog writing machine. Dozens of strangers each gave Elliot a different topic to write about, and she'd type up free stories on the spot -- with no auto-correct, spell-check or even Liquid Paper in sight.

Next, Elliot's planning to head to New York City to gather more Typewriter Stories for an upcoming collection. In the meantime, her creative writing experiment is proving to be a unique blend of performance art, public art, literature and text-based multimedia -- albeit with low overhead, bringing in tips instead of grants. But really, aren't they kind of the same thing? Here are 11 of Franki Elliot's typewriter stories from the Venice Boardwalk, followed by each person's requested topic and then commentary by Elliot.

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