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People started reciting poetry in the middle of Barney's Beanery last night

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It's not every day that a random old guy announces to a group of strangers that he likes tight pussy.

Actually, that happens all the time in Los Angeles. But this was different, because it wasn't an offer, but a performance. The man, actor Richard Large, was reciting poetry from the late Charles Bukowski: "What counts now is one more tight pussy before the light tilts out," goes the line from the famous Bukowski poem, "Crazy as I ever was."

Bukowski, who died in 1994, published thousands of poems and other creative works throughout his life. He is beloved by many for his focus on sex, alcohol and grimy Los Angeles life.

Legend is that Bukowski used to hang around Barney's Beanery in West Hollywood, getting wasted and writing his poetry on napkins. In keeping with that tradition, Barney's Beanery hosted a secret Charles Bukowski flash mob Thursday night.

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Pann's circa 1950: Photograph by Jack Laxer

​Common thinking is that architects are predominantly old white dudes (and they mostly are), but the Chinese American Museum's exhibition "Breaking Ground: Chinese American Architects in Los Angeles (1945-1980)" highlights four astonishing designers who eclipsed the profession's exclusionary demographic and changed L.A.'s look and feel in the 1950s and '60s.

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Photo by Calvin Lee

Main course inspired by Ed Ruscha's painting LACMA on Fire

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"You screwed up," chef John Rivera Sedlar told Getty curator Andrew Perchuk in the months before Pacific Standard Time began. The sprawling, Getty-funded celebration of postwar SoCal art should have included food. But Perchuk, already working to facilitate exhibitions at 60-plus institutions and organizing his own show, felt he had plenty to worry about besides appetizers and entrees. Later, though, after the frenzy surrounding PST's launch subsided, he decided Sedlar was right: PST should include food.

After all, didn't gallerist Everrett Ellin open the Chez La Vie café beside his original West Hollywood gallery in 1958, to serve the art-viewing public? Didn't dealer Virginia Dwan install working fountains by sculptor Jean Tinguely in homes of collectors before hosting a progressive dinner, plying guests with Champagne as they bussed from house to house? And hasn't Al's Café, the 4-month-long pop-up restaurant artist Al Ruppersberg staged in 1969, where he sold plates of art rather than food, become almost mythic for the way it made conceptual art a social experience?

The official PST menu, which debuted Saturday at Sedlar's year-old West Hollywood restaurant Playa and will be available to all diners starting Tuesday, Feb. 7, is far sleeker, honed and literal in its approach to food-as-art than anything I imagine Ruppersberg, Ellin or even the posh Dwan served when they dabbled in dining years ago.

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Carol Cheh

Dancer Alexa Weir enchants in a serpentine fashion, while choreographers Jed Caesar and Flora Wiegmann look on

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On Saturday night, LAXART and the Getty threw a lavish Ball of Artists, billed as the "culminating event" of the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival (which, in case you haven't noticed, has been going gangbusters for the past two weeks).

Although the press release positioned the event as a serious collection of artistic "interventions" and performances, it came off more as a gigantic appreciation party for L.A. artists, their friends and supporters. And when the Getty throws a party like this, believe me, you feel appreciated.

The event was black tie, invitation-only, and took place at no less than the iconic Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, a haunted estate with a checkered past and a long list of location shooting credits. Hordes of extremely well-dressed people started showing up around 5, for a party that lasted until 10. Although I was there for most of that expanse of time, I left with the strange feeling that I'd only been there for about 10 minutes.

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Tova Carlin, Ania Diakoff and Katerina Llanes' Sub-Standard installation

​If Los Angeles is a car culture, then the parking garage of the Standard Hollywood represents that beastly reality's bowels.

Art in the Parking Space, a project by Warren Neidich and Elena Bajo held in the parking garage of the Standard Hotel Hollywood as part of Pacific Standard Time's Performance and Public Art Festival on Tuesday night, was a mash-up of video, dance, walking tours and installations.

Neidich and Bajo's statement for Art in the Parking Space, the third installation of a yearlong project on the intersection of these two concepts, reflects their interest in "different environments and sets of cultural parameters that define the Los Angeles basin" -- and parking garages are a bigger part of that environment than we'd often like.

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Courtesy Judy Chicago. Photo: Donald Woodman.

Judy Chicago and Materials & Applications, "Disappearing Environments," 2012.

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Sure, if you arrived at Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2012 after seven last Thursday night, when the opening party ended, you had to lay down cash for your drinks. But outside, in the parking lot, the ice -- actually the dry ice -- was free. Thirty-seven tons of it, thanks to its implementation in a site-specific piece called Disappearing Environments.

The installation was a collaboration between artist Judy Chicago, known for her pioneering feminist work in the 1960s and 1970s, and Materials & Applications, a Silver Lake-based studio that combines notions architecture and art through experimentation.

As late afternoon gave way to dusk, as dusk gave way to night, steamy fog rose from a series of five-foot high pyramids built from blocks of the ice and lit by road flares to produce a seductive, elusive, ever-changing environment that enveloped fair attendees. Coinciding with the fair's opening bash, it became the instant must-post-on-Facebook-image, the art-fair-takeaway, the marker that you to had been there. But by the time the fair ended on Sunday, the piece had disintegrated. And that was the point.

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Brendan A. Murray

The end result

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Whoever said there are no accidents in art obviously never heard of Richard Jackson. On a clear Sunday afternoon in a field southeast of Pasadena's Rose Bowl, the 72-year-old artist literally launched his newest work of art: a flight-based performance piece that examines the nature, trajectory, scale and end result of the creative process, as well as its aftermath. But for most onlookers at the free outdoor spectacle (part of PST's Performance and Public Art Festival), all they saw was a large, remote-controlled airplane filled with paint crashing into a giant canvas, aka Accidents in Abstract Painting.

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Wallace Berman's 1969 Untitled (Shuffle): Turning a transistor radio into a playing card with phantasmagoric imagery. (Credit: Private Collection).

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It's high time to brave the Pasadena Freeway, thanks to four landmark Pacific Standard Time shows with ambitious curators, catalogues, and historical reach in Pasadena. Pasadena/San Marino has its PST "focus" weekend this Saturday and Sunday, which means lots of extra events.

Michael Duncan's "LA RAW: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles, 1945-1980," opening Jan. 22 at Pasadena Museum of California Arts, boasts 40 artists, including biggies Edward Kienholz, Judy Chicago, Chris Burden, David Hammons, and Paul McCarthy. Leah Lehmbeck's "Proof: The Rise of Printmaking in Southern California" at the Norton Simon ranges from Ed Ruscha and Richard Diebenkorn to Robert Rauschenberg.

But the real reason to get your butt out there now is to see two exhilarating PST shows that are about to close: Hal Nelson's "The House That Sam Built: Sam Maloof and Art in the Pomona Valley, 1945-1985" at the Huntington through Jan. 30 and Claudia Bohn-Spector and Sam Mellon's "Speaking in Tongues: The Art of Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken" at the Armory Center for the Arts through Jan. 21. Both give you a sense of how these artists supported each other and collaborated, and the shows are of a scale where you can really take in the work.

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Andrea Fraser in her fake guided tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989. Performance art? Yes.

​Are Lady Gaga and Mitt Romney performance artists? The mainstream press has said so, and there's not much to stop them. As an artistic practice, performance art is what happens when an event or action is framed for an audience. Which means it could be anything, really. So what distinguishes self-aware mass entertainment or political events from, um, art?

To prepare us for the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art festival, which begins today, we asked Andrea Fraser for help. Her most famous performances tease the everyday out of the cliqueish confines of institutional art, like her fake guided tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989 or the videotaped sexual encounter with a collector who paid Fraser $20,000 to be part of a work of art in 2003. She could be the world's sexiest performance artist.

In advance of her new work for West of Rome Public Art -- a staged performance of a feminist radio dialogue -- we asked Fraser to explain the discipline.

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Carol Cheh

From 'Everyman's Infinite Art' at Chapman University's Guggenheim Gallery

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The big wave of Pacific Standard Time shows that opened in September are starting to close, so the game is on to see the ones you want to see before they're gone. "Now Dig This!," for example, was totally packed with eager visitors this past Saturday, its second to last day at the Hammer Museum. And yesterday, I made the trek out to the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University to see "Everyman's Infinite Art," a true gem of a little show, tucked deep behind the orange curtain, and filled with whimsy, history, and delight.

The last day of the exhibition is this Saturday, Jan. 14. But theoretically speaking, you don't actually have to go see it. "Everyman's Infinite Art," originally mounted at Chapman in 1966 by artist and then-art department chair Harold Gregor, was a charming early entry in the language-based conceptual art sweepstakes. It primarily consisted of a published set of instructions for making the exhibition out of commonly available materials such as masking tape, ping-pong balls, juice cans, and boxes of envelopes. The instructions were clear and simple but could be installed in a number of ways, for example: "Ten yardsticks lined end to end. A stack of twenty-four white styrofoam coffee cups, open end down." And so on.

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