Carol Cheh

Just a few of the assholes of Los Angeles

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Forget the Fuck Yeah Fest -- on Sunday Los Angeles had its own Assholes Festival, courtesy of the artist collective Llano del Rio.

Held on the street corner outside of the Chinatown nonprofit art space Human Resources, the event was a celebratory launch for their new zine publication, An Antagonist's Guide to the Assholes of Los Angeles. The guide provides a crowd-sourced listing of numerous targets of anger and/or protest in the city, such as the 10 freeway, the weapons manufacturer Raytheon Company, ARCO gasoline, Eli Broad, LAX, the Venice Whole Foods and "that fucking whore who cut me off at the Robertson exit," among many others.

A funny and provocative pamphlet that acts as a sort of tool for creative social agitation, Assholes also features substantive essays, ranging from Lisa Anne Auerbach's humorous account of her day-to-day encounters with assholes around the city to Jennifer Flores Sternad's consideration of historic works of street-oriented performance art by artists of color and Marisa Jahn's dialogue on the meaning of the term "agonism" (defined by theorist Michel Foucault as "a relationship built on mutual incitement and struggle").

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18th Steet Arts

An installation by Ivan Argote and Pauline Bastard, who organized "Born to Curate"

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This week, there's a game show-style showdown in Santa Monica, a print fair at LACMA and a film that tours through facets of pre-invasion Baghdad showing in Eagle Rock.

5. Justin Bieber's leftovers
Art Is Shit Editions, a fairly young, L.A.-based art publishing company that produces objects as well as prints, has in its inventory a gold-glazed, headless Virgin Mary Vase by artist Wynn Bauer. It also has a sculpture, made entirely of chocolate, of a brown banana in a hot dog bun. Artist XVALA purportedly made the first of this editioned sculpture, called Justin Bieber's Banana Split: A Memento for Celebrity Exes, based on two moldy items he found when rifling through the star's residential trash. Art Is Shit, or AIS, will be among the exhibitors at the third annual L.A. Print Fair at LACMA this weekend. Its founders will discuss their work on a panel with Karen Fiorito of Buddha Cat Press, another irreverent L.A. publisher, at 4:45 Saturday. Brown Auditorium, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.; Sat., Feb. 23, 12:30-5 p.m.; free. (323) 857-6010, lacma.org.

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Courtesy Young Projects

Still from Ulu Braun's The Park (2011)

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*10 Best L.A. Art Galleries For Partying
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

This week, a new gallery debuts on Melrose, a film by and about a lover of life screens in West Adams and a light show plays out in a corner in Culver City.

5. Mind games
When artist James Turrell rented out Ocean Park's old Mendota Hotel in 1966, he famously turned the rooms into perfect, white boxes with no outside light sources. Then he started experimenting, projecting different colored lights and trying to change the way the space felt. Some of his experiments resulted in his Cross-Corner Projection series, where he would project two planes of light into a corner in such a way that it would look like there was a solid shape in the room with you, or it would look like there was an opening you could fall into. The effect would change as you moved around. Sometimes, the light seemed to be inside the room and sometimes it seemed to be shining in from some mysterious portal to the outside. One early Cross-Corner Projection, a pinkish-orange one shaped like tetrahedron, is on view now at Nye+Brown in Culver City. 2685 S. La Cienega Blvd.; through Feb. 23. (310) 559-5215, nyeplusbrown.com.

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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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Tyler Hubby

Bettina Hubby underneath her disco ball at the Rowena construction site

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

When artist Bettina Hubby started bringing her camera down to the construction site at the foot of her street on Rowena, the team working there wasn't surprised, just cautious. At that point, the project, officially the L.A. Department of Water and Power's River Supply Conduit Improvement Project, had been underway for about a year on a stretch of street that butts up against Ivanhoe Elementary, right across from Camelot Preschool and the Edendale Grill. The project would restore a pipeline, built in the 1940s, that brings water to from the L.A. reservoir to neighborhoods in South Central. It hadn't even pushed past its deadline yet -- the project was supposed to last just over a year and has now lasted three -- but Silver Lakers were already unhappy, and some would come around with cameras to document the source of their unhappiness. Some others would give the finger to the on-the-job mechanics and engineers as they crawled past at work-zone speeds.

Just this past December, heated debates between concerned parents of Ivanhoe students and the LADWP about the dangers of particulate matter almost led to a shut-down of the project until summer, and the crew put in 14 hour days on weekends while they waited to see what would happen. Hubby understood her neighborhood's frustration -- "it's been a hardship for everyone involved," she says. But directing animosity toward the site itself and the contractors working at it didn't make sense.

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Courtesy of the artists and Melissa Manning

Richard Hoeck and John Miller's "Something for Everyone" installation at MJ Briggs gallery

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*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament

This week, there's a symposium on what it's like to live at a time when real life is like sci-fi, a portrait of Jayne Mansfield's car on view and a cutout UPS man behind a window on Fairfax.

5. Superstition and sustenance
Thank You for Coming calls itself an "Experimental Art and Food Space," but it doesn't feel experimental in the way a lot of art + eating ventures do -- there are no performances that interrupt your meal, no tasks for you to perform before or after eating. The space, which opened in Atwater Village at the end of last year, is licensed as a restaurant, but the kitchen is exposed, tables are communal and the menu shifts nearly every week, or at least each time an artist/chef in residence takes over. Jennifer June Strawn, the first resident of 2013, will be at Thank You for Coming through Feb. 3 and all her menus are themed around superstition and sustenance. 3416 Glendale Blvd.; Wed-Sun, lunch 11 a.m. -3 p.m., dinner 6 -10 p.m.; $0-9. (323) 648-2666, thankyouforcoming.la.

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Courtesy MOCA

Still from Ryan Trecartin's P.opular S.ky (section ish)

This week, a frenetic, 40-minute-plus video airs on MOCAtv, a photo show gives famous and anonymous photographers equal play, and a short film brings together 21st-century preteens and a slavery-era hymn about deliverance.

5. Spirituals and sea creatures
Artist Lili White organizes the Another Experiment by Women Film Festival annually in New York, and then does several other showings throughout the year. The Armory Center for the Arts will host one of those other showings this weekend. The program includes Alessandra Cianelli's Story of an Octopus With a Heart-Shaped Head, a surreal dreamscape that really does feature heartlike organs and shapes floating around under and above water. It also includes Rebecca Louise Tiernan's One Mississippi, in which four preteen girls nap and stare and frolic in fields while old spirituals play -- at one point they circle a goth scarecrow while the words "I want to live with God" are sung aggressively. 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena; Fri., Dec. 28, (626) 792-5101, miascreen.com.

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BLU at Tou Scene, Nuart 2010

In Stavanger, Norway, every September for the past 12 years, Nuart, one of the largest street art festivals in the world, transpires. Closeted in the beautiful Fijords, Stavanger is a quaint, oil-rich community with a high standard of living, sometimes making the list as most expensive in all of Europe. However, it is not easy to get to, rains 20 hours out of every day (at least in the fall) and has a zero tolerance law when it comes to tagging and graffiti. A perfect spot to host preeminent street art and its artists?

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Metro Art

Andrew Leicester's "Foothills Basket Bridge" above I-210 in Arcadia

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This week, artists contemplate the end of the Mayan calendar, Metro debuts its strange new Gold Line bridge and a group exhibition experiments in portraiture.

5. Live-streaming the end times
The supposed upcoming apocalypse triggered by the end of the Mayan calendar has become a fixation. This weekend, there are end-of-the-world dance parties, dinner parties and one-night-only operas. Artist Jonas Becker, who is interested in end-days myths in general, is taking her camera to Mexico and spending the evening of Dec. 21 driving among Mayan ruins, filming and interviewing spiritual leaders, conspiracy theorists, tourists and others. Her footage will stream live during the concurrent Apocalypse Now? party in a Highland Park storefront. In addition to Becker's live stream, there will be beer by Dry River Brewing, karaoke and drawing supplies for people who want to express their end-of-world sentiments through art. 5118 York Blvd.; Fri., Dec. 21, 8 p.m. (951) 522 - 8573, beckerprojects.com.

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Rachel Heller

Rad vintage figurines make visitors wax nostalgic.

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*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

Nothing says happy holidays to a nerd like a shelf full of vintage action figures in Santa caps.

That's the sight that greets customers outside Curry House in West Los Angeles, drawing gasps and nostalgic smiles from passersby who peer into the display window outside the restaurant. In a large glass case, the usual faux-food spread has been cleared aside to make way for more than 120 late-80s and early-90s figurines, arms raised in yuletide glee. And atop their plastic and metal heads sit more than 120 tiny, red-and-white felt Santa caps handcrafted by Curry House assistant manager Hiroichi Echizen and his wife, Yoshiko.

There are characters from Street Fighter, Power Rangers, Dragon Ball, Gundam, Transformers, Godzilla and Kamen Rider, and even a bulky Arnold Schwarzenegger figurine from Last Action Hero. Marge Simpson, perched in the front row with her family, sports a modified hat that hugs her blue beehive. Ninja Turtles crony Usagi Yojimbo has paper carrots taped to his cap's brim.

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