Pearl & The Oysters- Side Quest
This song is from LA band Pearl & The Oysters’ 2024 album Planet Pearl.
They are playing at Alex’s Bar in Long Beach this Friday, 1/31/25, with Wargirl and Chapis.
Pearl & The Oysters- Side Quest
This song is from LA band Pearl & The Oysters’ 2024 album Planet Pearl.
They are playing at Alex’s Bar in Long Beach this Friday, 1/31/25, with Wargirl and Chapis.
“Snow-Laden Primeval (Meditations, on Log Phase and Decline rampant with Flatulent Cows and Carbon Cars)”, 2020, oil paint on canvas
Blockade ‘The Risen’, 1960-1961/2019, Oil on canvas / RISEN from the New York 1960-1961 painting, reconstructed in Amsterdam in 2019
Artist Jo Baer passed away this Tuesday at the age of 95. Her long career was marked by her transition away from the abstract works she became known for to figuration. She destroyed several of her original minimalist paintings but would later reproduce them in 2019 from archival images.
The works above are from her 2020 concurrent exhibitions at Pace Gallery– The Risen/Originals.
More on her life and career from Pace Gallery–
Born in Seattle in 1929, Baer studied biology at the University of Washington—where she also enrolled in introductory painting and drawing courses—and earned a graduate degree in psychology from the New School for Social Research in New York. She began her artistic career in Los Angeles in the early 1950s before returning to New York in 1960. There, she would become a key figure in the city’s burgeoning minimalist scene with her hard-edge paintings featuring bands of color around their edges. She also painted symbols and objects in some of her early works, often examining sexual and gender politics in these more figurative compositions.
Over the course of the 1960s, her paintings were exhibited alongside works by her mostly male peers—including Kenneth Noland, Robert Mangold, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, and Sol LeWitt—and she presented her first-ever solo show at Fischbach Gallery in New York in 1966. Following her mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1975, she relocated to Europe, first living in England and Ireland before settling in Amsterdam in 1984.
Baer’s search for renewal in the 1970s brought her to “radical figuration,” a term she coined in her now famous 1983 letter to Art in America, declaring that she was “no longer an abstract artist.” The term, which the artist later moved away from, describes a midway point between abstraction and figuration in which she could utilize partial, edited, or layered images—both found and created—to generate space for a new language within painting.
During her years in England and Ireland, Baer departed from pure abstraction in her work, developing a new aesthetic grounded in images, text, and prehistoric signs that combined the new, the old, and the mythical. Over the nine years she spent living in Smarmore Castle in County Louth in Ireland, Baer became fascinated by the region’s Neolithic history, opening her practice up to ancient histories of civilization. Seeing painting as a continually evolving tradition that could not be easily broken down into neat stylistic or periodic categories, Baer found as much inspiration in archaeology, anthropology, astronomy, and geography as in contemporary culture.
“I wanted more subject matter and more meaning,” the artist once said of her decision to move away from Minimalism. “There was an awful lot going on in the world, and I didn’t just want to sit there and draw straight lines.”
Below, in this video from the gallery, she discusses her body of work.
Blitzen Trapper- Planetarium
Every month I listen to the majority of bands/singers/musicians/artists who are playing in Los Angeles and select some for a monthly playlist. It includes a variety of genres and usually newer work by the artist.
The song above is from Blitzen Trapper’s 2024 album, 100’s of 1000’s, Millions of Billions.
Below are December’s selections-
This artwork, painted on a door in the East Village, was created by Australian American painter Charlie Hudson.
You can also find his work on Instagram.
Draag- The day has come
This song is from Draag‘s 2024 EP Actually the quiet is nice.
They are playing at Lodge Room in Los Angeles on Saturday, 1/25/25, with Barr, Casino Hearts, Mamalarky, Surfbort and more as part of a benefit for abortion funds, community and bodily autonomy.
Still from “Mulholland Drive”
Club Silencio scene with Rebekah Del Rio from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive
Today would have been artist and filmmaker David Lynch’s 79th birthday.
Although it was sad to hear of his passing, it was such a joy to spend the weekend looking through his artwork, reading the tributes from those who knew him, and rewatching his films and the documentary about him, The Art Life.
He also wrote Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, a short book filled with his thoughts on transcendental meditation, his films, digital video, creativity and more- worth checking out. Below is a short clip from one of his interviews with The Atlantic.
He also acted occasionally, both in his Twin Peaks series and in other projects. Below he plays another famous director, John Ford, in a clip from Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans.
And here he is on Louis C.K.’s show Louie.
David Lynch’s creative legacy will continue to influence and inspire people for many years to come. He was one of the greats.
Flat Top Desk, 1929 and 1962, Walnut and padauk, Flat Top Desk Chair, 1929, Walnut, padauk and laced leather seat, Flat Top Desk Figure, 1929, Bronze cast of cocobolo original
“Oblivion” 1934, Walnut
About the sculpture above, Oblivion, from the museum-
Moved by the emotion and physicality of actors, Esherick spent many hours in the balcony of the Hedgerow Theatre, in nearby Rose Valley, sketching performers, and many more hours designing stage sets, props, posters, and other visual elements for their productions. Oblivion was inspired by the passionate embrace of two actors in The Son of Perdition, a play by Lynn Riggs. This organic, fluid sculpture offers an exaggerated rendering of emotion as two intertwined bodies, carved from a single log, seem to softly dissolve into one another. Oblivion was prominently featured in the sculpture portion of the second Whitney Biennial in 1936.
This exhibition closes Sunday, 1/19/25.
Charles Ray “Family Romance”, 1993, and Ashley Bickerton “F.O.B.:Tied (White)”, 1993/2018
Charles Ray “Family Romance”, 1993
Maurizio Cattelan “WE”, 2010
Tishan Hsu, “mammal-screen-green-2”, 2024
Work by Josh Kline
“Untitled”, 2008-9, and “Two Breasts”, 1990, by Robert Gober
Mike Kelley, “Brown Star”, 1991 (left) and “The Judge”, 2018, by Jana Euler (painting on right)
Wanghechi Mutu, “One Cut”, 2018, (center sculpture); photographs by Cindy Sherman, 2010/2023
“Pep Talk”, 2024, by Cajsa von Zeipel and Jamian Juliano-Villani, “Women”, 2024, (painting on right)
Post Human, the current group exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch’s Los Angeles location, continues an artistic investigation of humanity that began with the 1992 exhibition of the same name. Some of the over forty artists (and even some of the works) were in the previous iteration, but now their work is placed alongside others made more recently. Seeing them together offers viewers a chance to contemplate the shifts and continuations in culture, technology, and what it means to be human.
From the gallery-
“Post Human was virtually a manifesto trumpeting a new art for a new breed of human,” wrote the art historian and curator Robert Rosenblum discussing the impact of the exhibition in the October 2004 issue of Artforum.
In 1992, Post Human, curated by Jeffrey Deitch, brought together the work of thirty-six young artists interested in technological advancement, social and aesthetic pluralism, and new frontiers of body and identity transformation. Through their art, these artists were exploring the same questioning of traditional notions of gender, sexuality and self-identity that was—and still is—taking place in the world at large. Capturing a developing social and scientific phenomenon, Post Human theorized a new approach to the construction of the self and interpretation of what defines being human. The exhibition set the agenda for the 1990s, and its influence on artists and philosophers led to a new field of academic study.
In her book Posthuman Feminism (2022), the philosopher and feminist theoretician Rosi Braidotti credits Deitch for capturing “the avant-garde spirit of the age by foregrounding the role of technology in blurring binary boundaries between subjects and objects, humans and non-humans.” She adds, “Post Human showed also that art assumed a much more central role as it merged with science, computerization and biotechnology in further re-shaping the human form and perfecting a flair for the artificial.”
The catalogue of the 1992 exhibition, with its visual essay and innovative design by the late Dan Friedman, also proved lasting relevance. Deitch’s influential essay predicted many of the scientific and sociological shifts that have since shaped our cultural and social environment, even the pandemic.
More than thirty years later, Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, revisits the theme of the exhibition, bringing the discourse into the present. The show includes several of the key figures who participated in the 1992 exhibition in dialogue with some of the most interesting artists continuing the exploration of these themes today. In keeping with the social and technological trends that inspired it, the interest in figuration of the original artists and the younger generations presented in the show is conceptual rather than formal.
Much of the then-new figurative work was descriptive of the “real” world but cannot, in fact, be called “realistic” in the conventional sense. That is because so much of the “real” world the artists were reacting to had become artificial. With the concept of the real disintegrating through an acceptance of the multiplicity of reality models and the embrace of artificiality, Realism as it was once known was no longer possible. This new figurative art may have actually marked the end of Realism rather than its revival.
Fully integrated into our pop psychology, the term “posthuman” is now used in everyday conversations and has come to primarily identify with the trope of the cyborg. This exhibition, like the 1992 show, however, examines multiple declinations and aspects of the postmodern construction of personality and the engineering and transcendence of the human body. The artists in the exhibition embrace notions of plurality, metamorphosis and multi-beingness. Cyber-futuristic, surgically improved, commodified, stereotyped, and politicized, the “cultured body” lends itself to reflect on a variety of concerns that define our age.
Several works in the exhibition will embrace the biometrical aestheticization of the human body to address the decay paranoia, the social conflict over genetic engineering and the use of biotechnologies, and the conversation around the limits of “natural” life.” Artists have long engaged with the threats of biometric surveillance, the possibility of virtual reality overtaking our physical one, the accelerating real-time consumption of experience, and the automation of the workforce. As AI’s ability to fulfill our creative and specialized needs has reached mass fruition, artists are confronting the impact of what was once considered speculative science fiction, an everyday reality.
Post Human was first presented at FAE, Musée D’art Contemporain, Pully/Lausanne (June 14–September 13, 1992) and traveled to Castello di Rivoli—Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli/Turin (October 1–November 22, 1992), Deste Foundation, House of Cyprus, Athens (December 3, 1992–February 14, 1993), Deichtorhallen Hamburg (March 12–May 9, 1993), Israel Museum, Jerusalem (June 23–October 10, 1993). A number of the works shown in 1992-1993 are now in international museum collections. Matthew Barney’s REPRESSIA (decline) (1991) is now in the collection of LACMA, where it was on view in 2023. Posthumanism has since been the subject of countless books, movies and high-profile exhibitions.
Artists in the exhibition: Isabelle Albuquerque, Matthew Barney , Ivana Bašić , Frank Benson, Ashley Bickerton, Maurizio Cattelan , Chris Cunningham , John Currin, Alex Da Corte, Olivia Erlanger , Jana Euler , Rachel Feinstein, Urs Fischer, Pippa Garner , Robert Gober , Hugh Hayden, Damien Hirst , Tishan Hsu, Pierre Huyghe, Anne Imhof , Alex Israel, Arthur Jafa, Jamian Juliano-Villani , Mike Kelley, Josh Kline, Jeff Koons , Paul McCarthy , Sam McKinniss, Mariko Mori , Takashi Murakami , Wangechi Mutu , Cady Noland, Charles Ray , Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith , Hajime Sorayama, Anna Uddenberg, Cajsa von Zeipel , Jeff Wall , Jordan Wolfson, and Anicka Yi
This show closes Saturday, 1/18/25.
Phantogram- All A Mystery
This song is from NYC band Phantogram’s 2024 album, Memory of a Day.
They will be playing at the House of Blues in Anaheim, California on Thursday 1/16/25.
Artwork by Jennifer Korsen aka humansmakeart
The devastation and loss from the fires in Los Angeles has been heartbreaking.
If you are looking for a way to help, several organizations have put together fundraisers-
Contemporary Art Review LA has put together an extensive spreadsheet that, along with fundraisers by organizations, also includes Go Fund Me pages for individuals and businesses
@griefxhope has set up a fundraiser and information on mutual aid for artists and artworkers impacted by the fires
Anti-Recidivism Coalition is taking donations to support the incarcerated fire crews that have worked tirelessly to help put out the fires (write “firefighter fund” on the donation)
Pasadena Humane has been caring for animals injured in the fires and those needing to be sheltered, as well as providing supplies to pet owners in need