Stefanie Keenan

SCI-Arc's glitzy gala designed by Alexis Rochas celebrated 40 years of training design heretics

This is the second installment of our Pacific Standard Time Presents diary, covering the Modern architecture extravaganza that's blanketing the city. Go here for the first installment: *The Getty's Big, New Exploration of L.A. Architecture.

Who would have guessed that with just the right amount of booze, architects can be so much fun? On a warm April night I headed to SCI-Arc for its 40th anniversary gala, which also provided a peek at the PSTP show "A Confederacy of Heretics: The Architecture Gallery, Venice 1979." The exhibition traces a series of shows held in architect Thom Mayne's Venice home in 1979 featuring a dozen architects who would come to put L.A. on the map. One could mill about the show then step into the other room and see those grinning heretics wearing the same smiles 30-odd years later (and in a few cases, I think, wearing the same clothes).

As guests dined on softball-sized orbs of short rib, Frances Anderton and Tom Gilmore tried their best to emcee the event over dicey acoustics and chatty guests, but the room paid full attention and rose to its feet when honoring the school's founder and first director, Ray Kappe, looking adorable at 85.

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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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The Box L.A.

Leigh Ledare's Double Bind (2010)

Pacific Standard Time, that half-year, regionwide paean to L.A.'s art history, officially ends on March 31. A show of vintage photographs and one last performance event send it off. Everything else on this week's list is forward-looking.

5. Rebel with a camera
When MOCA staged its big Dennis Hopper retrospective in 2010, it showed glossy, blown-up versions of Hopper's The Fort Worth 400. The exhibit included none of the vintage, 6-by-9-inch 1960s prints of hippies, artists, the Kennedys, Warhol and roadways. Small, scuffed, yellowed and animated by time, these prints by the guy who seemed to be everywhere and know everyone are at Craig Krull Gallery as part of Pacific Standard Time. 2525 Michigan Ave., #B-3, Santa Monica; through April 17. (310) 828-6410, craigkrullgallery.com.

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University of Washington Press

LA Xicano catalogue

The outdoor balcony on the north end of UCLA's Haines Hall was a fitting place for the informal pizza party last week concluding a series of Pacific Standard Time exhibitions loosely gathered under the "L.A. Xicano" heading. The campus building houses the Chicano Studies Research Center as well as the brain trust behind the curatorial vision that spawned what The New York Times lauded as one of the most engaging aspects of the behemoth L.A. art survey represented by the ambitious PST project.

For UCLA professor Chon Noriega and his team of art historians-cum-curators, PST represented an opportunity to de-shroud the historical record and posit the legacy of Mexican-American cultural and artistic production in this city as a viable, significant part of what makes L.A. an art capital.

Beginning last fall with "Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective,1972-1987," a LACMA show that offered the first major look at the '80s conceptual and performance art collective that called itself "nausea" in Spanish, L.A.'s oft-overlooked Chicano art legacy is finally being acknowledged. While not one of the five "L.A. Xicano" exhiitions, the Asco show was an officially sanctioned part of PST, and it handily anticipated what could best be described as a banner season for Chicano art, with about 80 artists exhibiting their work across L.A. in some of its most prestigious institutions.

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Carol Cheh

Margaret Honda's Slip, installed at Commonwealth and Council, is a sculpture made out of discarded remnants of the artist's old works.

Commonwealth and Council, an artist-run exhibition space and studio in the heart of Koreatown, is what some might call a classic "underground" art joint. It's located on the second floor of a dilapidated building, and you have to walk between Amigos Liquor and the popular OB Bear Korean pub to find the entrance. After you ascend a steep flight of stairs, you poke through establishments that include a Korean church, an acupuncture practice and one of the city's oldest Latino AA meeting spaces to find the modest set of rooms that comprise CW&C.

It's easy to find on an opening night, as CW&C's openings are raucous affairs that attract throngs of in-the-know guests, who tend to linger past midnight. The crowd at CW&C, which is still primarily known through social media and word of mouth, is composed mostly of artists who are there to support and network with each other.

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YouTube

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

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

"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

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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