100% Information, almost.

Publications

+ A Prior Magazine
+ ADBUSTERS MAGAZINE
+ Ag
+ AK47 : An online art
+ Animal New York
+ aperture
+ Art in America
+ Art Monthly
+ ART ON PAPER
+ ART-e-FACT
+ art.es
+ ARTFORUM
+ Artist Newsletter [a - n ] Magazine
+ Artnet Magazine Germany
+ Artnet Magazine US
+ ARTnews
+ ArtReview
+ Arts & Letters Daily
+ ArtsEditor
+ artsy
+ BEAUTIFUL/DECAY
+ bitch
+ Blind Spot
+ BOMB
+ Brooklyn Rail
+ C
+ Cakewalk
+ CMYK Magazine
+ contemporary magazine
+ Daily Constitutional
+ DAZED&CONFUSED
+ e-cart contemporary art magazine
+ Electric Skin : Black Art and Techno
+ Esopus Magazine
+ Eye Magazine
+ f - stop magazine
+ Fence Books
+ Flash Art
+ Foto8
+ Frieze
+ Glowlab
+ Juxtapoz
+ LUMPEN
+ MELOMAG
+ Modern Painters
+ mooncruise
+ Nat Creole.magazine
+ NextLevel
+ Nude magazine
+ Pavilion
+ Polar Inertia
+ Portfolio Catalogue
+ PUPU
+ Revolver
+ Roma Publications
+ SEESAW MAGAZINE
+ Shifter
+ SOFT TARGETS
+ Source
+ Stay Free!
+ TALENT IN MOTION
+ the journal
+ URBANA Magazine
+ Variant
+ white hot magazine of contemporary art
+ Whitewall
+ X-TRA
+ Zing Magazine
+ Zoetrope All Story

Lisa Sanditz at ACME

This link will take you to the review. file://localhost/Users/andycline/Desktop/Sanditz%20review.html

Andrea Fraser's New Post at UCLA

Andrea Fraser, Friedrich Petzel gallery, has taught as a UCLA visiting lecturer, but has recently taken a tenured position in the New Genres department.

Process: The Iraq Painting

An incredibly long and relatively painful project I've started since being in LA is the Iraq painting shown here. These images show the painting at about 1/3 completion. The idea here was to make as many marks as there are dead Iraqis as a result of the US occupation. The study I used was the Lancet
study that was produced in conjunction with Johns Hopkins University, a controversial report with a high estimate of Iraqi dead, around 650,000 people, including people who might have died as a result of trauma that aggravated

health conditions. In the painting, roughly 24'x6', I am counting every touch of the brush as if it were an Iraqi victim of the occupation. The idea of trying to experientially quantify the magnitude of a war became compelling to me as I started to think about the seething masses of people on this planet and the unfathomable effects we have on each other and our environment.
I make somewhere between 8,000 and 16,000 marks per full work day. I've had to work a lot for money, haven't been in the studio consistently, and am hovering at about 200,000 marks right now. I've started to paint different shapes that relate to the theme of the work, only choosing objects that can also be quantified. For example, I have almost finished the five maps of Iraq that are placed throughout the painting. They are executed with 168,743 marks to correspond with the square mileage, the total geographical area of the country. Other symbolic and iconic objects with be included in this text based, process painting and they will also be quantified.
I hoped to perceive the gravity of such a large number of deaths and in taking on this project, I've begun to connect with how shameful it all is. The counting is painful, dull, repetitive and I find myself forgetting what number I'm on.


Sometimes I forget a thousand marks. Other times I imagine that I've counted more than I have. Some marks happen quickly. I imagine that the person behind that mark died abruptly. Other marks wind around for some time. Some are silent and others lunge and stab before they're done. The process has given me, above all, a time to reflect on the tragedy of Iraq and to wonder if there's a way for us through art, through education, through demonstration, to end this awful national pasttime.

Photography: People and Places: part 1

I've taken a lot of photos since I've been in LA. The camera relates to my work because for one, it gives me hard physical evidence of a non-solipsistic world, a world where objects and subjects exist on their own accord and on their own terms, they don't melt and morph to coincide with the fancies of my mind. I started using the camera a lot because it was helpful to have reference photos when I was working, and then, of course, I began to get interested in making better photographs.
Using the camera journalistically to record a place and the people who inhabit the place, and to record how the people and the place change over time has given me insight into narrative structures, what it takes to convey the continuity of a situation over a passage of time and space. I regard my paintings as narrative in this way, but having the opportunity to use the camera in three dimensional scenarios has helped me to get a better grasp on what the narrative means visually, how to leave clues and overlap images so that they are connected.

The camera has become a way of drawing or sketching ideas and progressions, concepts, making notes in a Robert Smithson journaling sense, but it has also become an end in itself over the last several months. I've explored it aesthetically as well as conceptually and towards different ends, from publicity shots for musicians and actors, to

series of photos that work like video stills and progress over time, to abstraction, gesture, and journalism.

foggy GRIZZLY: Interview with Katrin Plavcak

foggy GRIZZLY: Interview with Katrin Plavcak

Nicola Tyson at Marc Foxx

If ever there was an artist' artist, it was the solipsistic one, fulfilled by reveling in their own painting history, the be all and end all and the singular compulsion for painting. Often when I see painting shows these days, people who fit this description are the ones that are still doing something interesting with the medium itself. Those who carry, intentionally or not, the flag of Cezanne in their ceaseless experiments with distortions,
their perceptions, how it expresses when cast into a figure, a landscape, etc, are the ones who seem to make me feel something buttery and living when I look at their work. Other work is smarter, more relevant, more necessary, but it really is refreshing to take a break from all those theories and ethics and just enjoy looking at a drawing or a painting, letting it's lines, it's gesture, the tactile qualities and the visible considerations, pondered long and hard for effect the mind. And with Nicola's paintings on view at Marc Foxx, there's more than just the visceral to chew on. Eight paintings in the main gallery and sixteen drawings one gallery down at Domestic provide plenty of food for thought. The figures depicted in these works, often distorted grotesquely/elegantly with umbilicals connected to genitals, turbans and women, distorted faces remind one a bit of Francis Bacon and John Graham, revealing a disturbing psychology that through color, touch and sensibility becomes almost erotically appealing.
After reviewing Robert Wilson, Nicola Tyson is a good antidote, renewing faith in the alchemical medium of paint. Nicola lives in New York and shows with Freidrich Petzel. Her works are included in major collections and museums, and now, for the first time, she exhibits in LA.

The Day Job, part 1

These posts combine visual information from my work in films, music videos, commercials, tv, photo shoots and other entertainment related art and design jobs with my concerns and interests as a fine artist. I want to explain in "The Day Job" posts why production designing, art directing, set dressing, prop mastering and other related jobs have been invaluable to me in forming more developed ideas about fine art and how it relates to the contemporary situation. In this particular entry I will include an image or two from a recent project, making a concerted effort not to reveal too much, to give some interested parties a sense of what I do here in LA and why I've been able to remain interested in it.


So, recently I had, for the first time, the opportunity to actually production design a project. I've managed and made many important creative decisions about other designer's projects up to now, but this was the first, and certainly not the last time that I will be the creative executor of a project. In this project, I had an interior space and an exterior space to deal with. Most people responded most strongly to the changes I made to the interior space of a roller derby rink, but I was most excited about some elements that were on the periphery of the rink, such as the ten foot tall bag of popcorn and one of the fifteen foot team banners pictured above. The space, a roller derby rink, was so sculptural, three dimensional and begged for effects that accentuated it's organic contours and that underscored its sense of scale. I wanted to have some disproportionately large objects to create a bit of scale distortion and and give the rather gray and drab roller rink a heightened level of dynamism. I was excited in this case to be able to get away from what people are often occupied with in this business, dressing rooms, and to begin to move into a three dimensional, abstract compositional space within which people would interact and a drama would unfold, a drama that was to be shaped by the environment.

I will summarize now and elaborate in future posts, that I've felt a chasm between the depiction of ideas 2-dimensionally and the actual three-dimensional world that surrounds us. When last in Paris, I marvelled at the Louvre and the buidings along the river there, how magnificent they were, and how they humbly housed these 2 and three dimensional decorations inside. The architecture seemed infinitely more profound at the time and that impression has stayed with me. I don't think one form, architecture or art, is superior to the other, but I do think that they are married to each other, bound, and I see my work exploring the relationship between an environment and an object within that environment. I forsee volumetric abstraction becoming three dimensional and it's walls if they can be called that, becoming inhabited with visions of the mundane, as fantasies one might have when living in Candyland.

Robert Wilson at ACE, Los Angeles

Voom Portraits
by Andy Cline

Robert Wilson, internationally acclaimed playwright, choreographer, stage designer, and on and on, whose accomplishments in the theatrical and collaborative realms rival any of the most prolific artists in their fields has adorned the walls of ACE gallery with a new collection of Voom portraits, looped video portraits of mostly famous actors and other celebrities such as Princess Caroline of Monaco.
The link above will allow you to view images in still form, but the stills are nothing compared to the actual installation on view at ACE until the end of May. Most of these "portraits" are looped video sequences and the best of them are very subtle. For example, one room at ACE contains 9 Salma Hayek "portraits" in black and white on 42" flat screen plasmas mounted on the wall at standard museum heights. When you first walk into the room these portraits seem like stills, her hair pulled back a la 1920 and adorned with a delicate feather boa, but as you begin to spend time with each image, you notice that occasionally her eyes are blinking and the feathers around her neck are trembling in a gentle breeze. In the periphery, the other images still appear as stills, but you know they are alive and moving in their own rhythms.
The downside to the show is the celebrity domination of the imagery. There is only one piece in the show, an older mechanic with swolen purple hands and a homicidal gaze of fear, aside from the collection of frogs in one room and a lone owl in another and a large panting dog, that get away from Wilson's overarching subject: celebrity. But after getting over the pop value of the installation, one realizes how profound these Voom portraits really are. Not an uncritical observer of the introduction of technological media and processes into the fine art realm, I find these portraits accomplishing what I may have thought not possible, what I admire so in a great Sargent painting, in that they capture the delicate living quality of a human subject. Film and stage alike are rather garish in this regard as compared to painting. Robert Wilson's Voom portraits, at their best, accomplish the subtlety of a figure, the slightly unconsciously changing personality of form.

Dueling Light: Where is the Now?

The Work of Dan ATTOE and Pasha Rafat

By Andy Cline



First, there is the material and to anyone with simple perception these two exhibits, Dan ATTOE at Peres Projects and Pasha Rafat at Ace Gallery, Beverly Hills, fall under the same general category. They both are interested in light works, both employ neon, the manipulation of gasses and electricity, work with transformers to power the work and exhibit in light modified spaces that compliment their exhibitions. But this is as far as their kinship goes.
Dan ATTOE is a painter who has only recently ventured into light works and has taken to them as a working man takes to blinking bar lights after long days in the trenches. Witty aphorisms coupled with symbolic imagery as primitive as patriotism and god, ATTOE situates us in a deeply psychological night life environment where acute observations in the form of text echo through the stock symbolism of the American mind. When I entered the room, I had an initial feeling of apprehension, surrounded by a drunken kitsch of many a night remembered and forgotten over the years, flashbacks came of glaring Budweiser neon signs and cheap people looking for cheap thrills. ATTOE evokes this imagery in light works, neon wall pieces and illuminated light boxes with painted images printed on mylar. He executes these works with a draftsman’s hand and adds what could be our very own sardonic reflections (in text) when we encounter an eagle, an angel, skeletons, a woman’s open thighs, a gentle deer in the woods.. Here he has captured the fleeting thoughts evoked by wood panelling and low brow diversions that are both wise and self destructive.
ATTOE’s exhibition is transparent in its meaning and implications. He has found an eloquent language via contrast between a romantic American landscape and the brutish people that traverse it, who surround themselves with trophies and reflect on themselves and others, often with judgement and disapproval. I paraphrase from the press release when I agree that in ATTOE’s work there is both an immense empathy as well as contempt for the common American man and woman. He helps us to acknowledge our cultural roots. Unless a person grew up in a stinking rich family, no matter how many degrees one attains,

one can still recognize their experience, family members if not themselves in Dan ATTOE’s works. Most saliently, this exhibition takes us beyond the veneer of an utterly branded society, past the face recognition of signs and logos and on to the subtext of what these signs and symbols could or should evoke within us.
If you haven’t guessed by now, I think this show was successful but I wouldn’t have been nearly excited about it if I hadn’t first seen Pasha Rafat’s light works at Ace Gallery.
Deep in Beverly Hills, minimalism is resurrected in the work of Pasha Rafat. These works, were immediately deflating for me. Mostly geometrical compositions with homemade neon tubes, a collection of about 20 sparsely distributed pieces surrounded me. Blues, reds, yellows and whites dominated the palette and forms such as circles, X’s, diamonds, and corner pieces traversing 2 walls abounded. A persistent loud hum emitted from the transformers that supplied life to these works, an ambient sound problem that preparators grappled with for almost two weeks before reaching a solution. The gallery was illuminated when I viewed the works so they didn’t appear as they do in the images provided. They were washed out by the light. The artist should’ve insisted on how the works were presented if he wanted to achieve optimal effect. It’s telling that Rafat teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, light works capital of the world.

Rafat claims Russian Structuralism as an influence (he’s from nearby Iran, originally) and honestly, I would like to see more of the pressures and forces that are pursued in that school. Albers was more akin to the Russian Structuralists than he ever was to Minimalism, and so it is with Rafat, only Rafat’s effort seems a bit flaccid. If minimalism is the objective of these works, they seem more like Neo-Expressionist Paintings, simplistic facsimiles in the midst of earlier and better work. Even minimalism that worked didn’t work in the end. Modernist metropolitan dwellings stifled life and community and led to outbreaks of violent crime. I feel similarly with Rafat’s work. Not that I’m not a fan of minimalism. Judd had authority, Sol Lewitt was lyrical,

James Turrell is ethereal and Dan Flavin... Well, he’s complicit here, but he was there in the beginning man!!! As for Rafat, it seems that he’s following dutifully, keeping a school of art alive that has seen its day and is now stuffing it down the throats of future generations. How can anyone get excited to go see a show like this? It’s like going to a funeral. I think ATTOE could spice it up a bit with some quotes from a zombie flick or two.
Pasha Rafat has chosen a path in his image making that is protected by institutions that are similarly rigid and stifling. It seems to me that the lesser works of Minimalism like Rafat’s tends to be cruel and anti-humanist and pursues a path that kills the creative force in humanity rather than fosters it. Many artists have abandoned illusionism, explored the structure of basic geometric forms, but have been able to retain, maybe despite themselves, an identity that ingratiates us to their work. Donald Judd is a great example of a purist minimal artist whose presence was so strong in his boxes and cylinders that the work defied its lack of content and became meaningful as forms. It was Donald Judd’s form, fragments of Donald Judd’s substance, and we can feel that today... And they were interesting. Peter Halley has taken geometric abstraction and humanized it with color, speed, tension and individuated parts without turning to illusionism. Rafat’s work in the march of time will reinforce the walls and barriers of institutional art. The works will occasionally feature in a college text book, and that’s about it.

Dan Flavin Untitled (For you Leo, in long respect and admiration) 1977