Special Entertainment

The iconic "What" zeppelin, projected onto MOCA downtown

​In 1972 Asco spray-painted their signatures onto the walls of LACMA, asserting themselves as active members of the art community despite the fact that LACMA wasn't yet willing to show their work.

Last Wednesday night, Milwaukee-based Special Entertainment, the partnership between artists Andrew Swant and Bobby Ciraldo, also inserted their signature into the L.A. art world. Swant and Ciraldo, creators of Samwell's "What What (In the Butt)" viral video, which has gotten 45 million views since it was posted to YouTube five years ago, projected the video's iconic zeppelin with the word "What" on it onto MOCA downtown, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Scientology Center and various other cultural institutions and locations around Los Angeles.

Then, on Thursday, the duo presented video footage of the drive-by projection event at Nate Page's Machine Overnight Guerrilla Project at Storefront Plaza, hosted by Machine Project.

Special Entertainment's trip out West and its series of projections was organized in part by Sara Daleiden's MKE-LAX program, promoting artistic exchange between Milwaukee and L.A., fostered in celebration of the five-year anniversary of "What What (In the Butt)."

More >>

Photo by Gene Ogami

Izhar Patkin's room-size painting The Dead Are Here was the subject of an hourlong meditation

​

Seven years ago, artist Nuttaphol Ma spent three hours staring at a painting he hated. He was working at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and was assigned to stand guard over a particularly vulnerable work. "It was full of things you'd find at Michael's -- lots of glitter, beads, junk," says Ma, whose own work is meticulous and meditative. "I thought it was awful."

The intensity of his reaction surprised him and he thought, "If I have to stand here, I'd better just look at this piece. That's what it's here for." He looked for an hour. Nothing changed. "I told myself, OK, find something you love, and use that as an entry point." He pretended he was rock climbing with his eyes, moving up and down, in and out of the beads and glue and fabric.

"At first, it was like swimming in a sea of trash, going up and down this massive piece," he remembers. Then, an hour and a half in, he saw the reflection of light against a bead. "It reminded me of a water drop off a leaf. I entered the piece there." He began to move his eyes up and down again, this time appreciating the intentional way in which each small piece had been placed. "It was magical, when that shift in perception happened." He didn't actually start to like the painting, but, at the end of the three hours, "The sea of trash had become a sea of coral."

I don't think anyone at Shoshana Wayne Gallery Wednesday night hated Izhar Patkin's massive ink-on-tulle painting The Dead Are Here. But Peter Clothier asked his captive audience to move their eyes slowly up and down the painting's folds, in the same way Ma moved his across the painting he was battling.

More >>

Courtesy of the artist and OHWOW

Daniel Arsham's work Hiding

​

At OHWOW gallery, things are no longer as they seem: The otherwise smooth, white walls have grown a few avant-garde appendages. One is shaped like a human; another oozes; all are unquestionably strange.

These appendages are part of artist Daniel Arsham's first solo West Coast exhibition, playfully named "the fall, the ball and the wall," which opened Jan. 27.

At 31, Arsham is a rising star in the art world. He has collaborated with Merce Cunningham and the photographer and Dior Homme designer Hedi Slimane. He also works closely with critically acclaimed choreographer Jonah Bokaer, who performed an improvisational dance at the opening. And if that's not enough, Arsham's collaborations have all been in different capacities -- as an artist, architect and theater designer, specializing in cerebral and unexpected spatial distortions.

More >>

Courtesy of LACDA

Pia Myrvold's Flow, a digital video wall installation

​

In a world where creative individuals increasingly work in a cluster of disciplines -- actors sing in bands, rock stars paint, poets take up performance art, architects explore couture, rappers write books, etc. -- Norwegian painter, fashion and architectural designer, installation and electronic media artist Pia Myrvold is still a remarkably industrious polyglot.

Her current exhibition, "Immersion" at LACDA, is derived from the large-scale installation Flow: A Work in Motion, staged in Italy as a satellite of the 2011 Venice Biennale, and focuses exclusively on digital art.

More >>

This is what a wall of Ellen portraits looks like

​

Pop art will never die, so long as bizarre celebrity obsessions keep it fresh, fun and, y'know, weird. So what's with Ellen? How many renditions of her mug do you think you can handle in one gallery opening?

This weekend at the Terrell Moore Gallery, artist Renda Writer assembled his second annual birthday tribute to Ellen DeGeneres, with exactly 67 portraits of Ms. DeGeneres (that's, um, her age...plus 13 extra for shits and giggles). Fortunately, Mr. Writer's idée fixe on the syndicated talk show host comes with some solid altruism: A portion of all the proceeds from the evening's take and the paintings' sales went to the Trevor Project, an L.A.-based crisis-intervention organization for LGBT youth.

On to the paintings:

More >>

Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe

Banks Violette's sculpture of Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s team number

​

"I'm pretty sure my fans will wear this award as a badge of honor," racer Dale Earnhardt Jr. said when he accepted the 2011 Most Popular NASCAR Driver Award in December. "And so they should, because the award is theirs."

This was the ninth consecutive time Earnhardt Jr., whose grandfather was a racer and whose father died driving in a 2001 race Earnhardt Jr. nearly won, has been given the honor. It's either his scarred family legacy or his rough-edged Southern accent that keeps his fans on his side. Certainly, it's not his record, since he hasn't actually had a win in 1,318 days (and counting), according to Over88ted.com, a website that exists solely to keep track of Earnhardt's chokes and losses, and is named for his team, No. 88.

Because New York-based artist Banks Violette is interested in what's overrated -- especially when there's a strangely obsessive, sometimes violent subculture attached -- he crafted two steel, 6-foot-tall number 8's for his current exhibition at Blum & Poe gallery in Culver City. The numbers are hollow with burnt and corroded edges. One room over is another 88 written on aluminum with black tape in the same slanted font Earnhardt Jr. uses on his cars and jerseys.

More >>

jgarbee

The Hot Pink Catwalk Entry at the Affordable Art Fair

​What a difference a few blocks make in the theory of relativity of art value. Yesterday, we went to the L.A. Art Show: Modern & Contemporary at the L.A. Convention Center and the Affordable Art Fair at the event deck at L.A. Live, both of which run through Sunday.

To test your eye for blue chip art, in the photos that follow, guess which are from the L.A. Art Show, and which are from the Affordable Art Fair "side" of downtown. We'll give you the show and sticker price afterwards. The prize? Imagine the gallery director resume potential. Right. Turn the page.

More >>

Artwork © Ellsworth Kelly. Photo: Joshua White. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

The new gallery's luscious interior, with its current show of recent Ellsworth Kelly works.

​
I first got wind of the news that Matthew Marks was opening a new gallery in Los Angeles about a year ago. When a big, well-known, blue chip New York gallery decides to set up shop in our funky left-coast city, it's a big deal. You expect a huge splash and something a cut above the usual art gallery fare.

I was able to preview the new space this past week and I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised and intrigued by the creative decisions Marks made in crafting his L.A. outpost, which unexpectedly leans toward the low-key. First, there's the location. It's not in Beverly Hills, like the über-entity known as Gagosian. It's not even located near the tony cluster of top galleries in West Hollywood. Rather, it's on a quiet, tree-lined residential street, just south of a wildly mixed-use block of Santa Monica Boulevard. The gallery's next-door neighbor is an Orthodox Jewish mortuary. Next to that is a marijuana dispensary. And directly across the street is CT Nails #9. Talk about off the beaten path.

It would be easy to miss the building if you happen to be walking in the neighborhood. It's an extremely simple square monument painted all white, with a single black band overlaid across the top of its front end. Its simplicity, however, belies a lot of careful planning and thought.

The building was designed by popular L.A.-based architect Peter Zellner, who is known as the "go-to architect" for up-and-coming art galleries (he's responsible for the Susanne Vielmetter, Walter Maciel, and LAXART spaces in Culver City, among others). And the black band is actually an artwork by Ellsworth Kelly, who is the featured artist in the gallery's inaugural show.

More >>

Courtesy Cherry and Martin; Photo by Robert Wedemeyer

Brian Bress' 2012 video portrait Infinite Man (Britt)

​

Brian Bress' video portrait Infinite Man is actually of a woman, even though that woman wears a Gene Kelly look-alike mask and circles around for ten minutes in front of tens of identical male faces. Bress made the mask and painted the backdrop before he asked his girlfriend to appear in the piece.

"It seemed to undermine the idea, to have her there," inside the sea of men, he says. Now, at least to him, Infinite Man has become her. "When I see the video, I picture Britt kneeling on a rotating platform inside a head that's completely dark and think of her telling me she used every meditation skill she'd learned to stay focused."

Nearly all the video portraits in "Under Performing," Bress' current exhibition at Cherry and Martin gallery, started that way, as eccentric collages, costumes, sets or vague ideas he pieced together before deciding who his portrait would be of. The complications of that approach are exactly what interested him: "Is it still a portrait if I put a mask on someone and tell them how to act?"

More >>

Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Damien Hirst's 12-foot wide painting entitled Isonicotinic Acid Ethyl Ester (2010-11)

​

"I often get asked about the spot paintings," said artist Damien Hirst in 1997, interviewed eleven years after he'd begun painting colored dots on white, spacing them systematically and never repeating a color on any one canvas. People would say, "'I love your work, but why do you do those stupid spots? They're not good."

"Good" wasn't the point. Hirst wanted to be like a scientist. "Art doesn't purport to have the answers; the drug companies do," he explained. Right now, Hirst's spot paintings, hung in eleven Gagosian Galleries around the world for "The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011," a multi-part stunt of an exhibition, look more like candy than medicine.

More >>