Dennis Hopper’s art will always be overshadowed by his films. That only makes his art that much more intriguing. Dennis Hopper Double Standard at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary reveals an artist fully engaged with the aesthetics and issues of his time, although not directly propelling them. The time in question is from the early 1960s through very recently. (Hopper died May 29 of this year.) The largest share of work here are his photographs. They document not only Hollywood and rock music (images of Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones with a sitar, and a young, bikini’d Jane Fonda are among those that are iconic and compelling), but the kinetic Los Angeles art scene and major social issues. These include the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery Freedom March, and the 1967 Sunset Strip curfew riots, which Hopper documented tellingly. Unfortunately, MOCA stacked the hundreds of photos in 20-foot-high towers, making it impossible to get close to some of the best. Why not put the Geffen Contemporary’s cavernous spaces to better use and Read More
Infamous street artist Banksy’s documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop, premiered this week to lots of underground-ish hype (including L.A. Weekly cover story for which Banksy created original art). In the film (which Hot Sheet hasn’t seen yet), Banksy is the subject of the documentary, only to announce that he thinks the “actual” filmmaker – another artist named Thierry Guetta – is more interesting. So Banksy hijacks Guetta’s footage and makes the movie about him. Got all that? Doesn’t matter, say jaded and arts-savvy film reviewers, because the whole thing is hoax. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis comes to that conclusion. So does Fast Company design writer Alissa Walker. Banksy himself denies it. One of the funniest denial quotes ever printed in the New York Times reads: ‘ “I don’t know why so many people have been fooled into thinking this film is fake,” Banksy, or someone purporting to be he, wrote in an e-mail message from Los Angeles.’
So, if they’ve been fooled into thinking it’s fake, who fooled them? Banksy? If so, then it is a fake. Oh, never mind…
The hot-rod artist who became a fine artist – but who never lost his hot-rod roots – has a new show. And now Robert Williams has thrown sculpture into his repertoire. He may be best known for his Guns ‘n Roses album cover, “Appetite for Destruction,” but Williams’ high-brow side has always been just as stimulating as his paintings that riff on movie posters, tattoo iconography, girlie magazines and surfer art. New York’s Tony Shafrazi Gallery is showing “Conceptual Realism, In the Service of the Hypothetical” through January 23, 2010. An accompanying book is published by Fantographics. Image shown here: “Sculldy Dumpty,” oil on canvas.
Kenny Scharf has made a career out of perverting cartoon imagery and he’s not going to stop now. Born in Hollywood and first gaining fame in the 1980s Manhattan art scene of Fun gallery and beyond, the pop artist particularly fixates upon warped visions of the Flintstones and Jetsons. Scharf’s new show at Honor Fraser gallery in Los Angeles is no exception. The exhibition is called Barberadise, presumably in reference to cartoon producers Hanna Barbera. The art, according to the gallery, “implies a utopian world that is at once nostalgically comic and vibrantly cosmic. However, even in this utopia everything is still tinged with the subversive undertone of the disarray that was left behind.”
Expect to see Fred and Wilma join 2-D donuts floating in space, happily menacing amoebas, and hyper-colorful jungles.
Artist Sandow Birk is at it again. He has established his career by placing classic art and literature in contemporary – often humorous – settings. Birk’s mock-heroic epic, “In Smog and Thunder” portrays Los Angeles and San Francisco at war, in paintings suggestive of 18th century battle portraits. He also recently re-illustrated the entire Divine Comedy by Dante into contemporary American English. Birk’s latest combination of the archetypal with the typical is American Qur’an: exhaustive, hand-illustrations of The Koran, rendered in graffiti-writing style, set against images of contemporary urban America. An exhibition continues at Culver City’s Koplin del Rio gallery through October 30.
Maybe both. And that’s a good thing. Nearly 30 years after the U.S. artist barged on the scene with “readymade”-style installations (a basketball floating in an aquarium) and seemingly kitschy artifacts (a gaudy sculpture of “Michael Jackson with Bubbles” the chimp), cynics are still saying, “That’s not art, that’s just a guy making money.” Koons has certainly made a lot of it. In 2007 Luxist declared him the world’s top-selling auction artist. But an exhibit soon to close at London’s Serpentine Gallery yet again puts Koons squarely in the legitimate pop-art tradition of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and – the absolute pioneer- Robert Rauschenberg. “Triple Popeye” is a wide-eyed play on pop surfaces.
And it’s funny. Is Koons’ work merely “kitsch”? That is, does it poke fun of art for people with unsophisticated tastes? Koons said no, in a recent interview with The Daily Beast’s Anthony Haden-Guest: “I don’t believe in kitsch if the word is used to make judgment and to segregate. My work really embraces. No judgments.”
Make your own judgment. “Michael Jackson with Bubbles” is on display at L.A.’s Broad Contemporary Art Museum. And a 70-foot replica of a steaming locomotive, suspended 160-feet in the air, is coming to L.A. County Museum of Art in four years.
Blog Downtown previews L.A.’s monthly Downtown Art Walk. The event is always a peak street experience, with dozens of galleries and thousands of art peeps. The blog’s lead item to preview? The event at Gary Leonard’s Take My Picture gallery (860 S. Broadway). Photographer Leonard’s gallery will host “a cross night of Real Estate and Advertising poetry alongside ‘The Billboard Show: Selling the So-Cal Lifestyle. Photographic Landscapes of the 1950s and 1960s.’ ” Blog Downtown goes on to note that this event, Ad/Verse Reactions, will feature Ed Rosenthal, the Poetbroker of Downtown Los Angeles performing real estate poetry, and, Jack Skelley, Senior VP of Paolucci Communication Arts (and Hot Sheet editor), performing advertising poetry. Providing music are members of The French Semester, who just returned from Europe and a gig at Joel Bloom Square. MC for the experience is Tom Gilmore, developer/mayor of the Old Bank District.
Sure, it’s hard to pick one. But the Guggenheim museum – with the best Kandinsky collection anywhere, and the closest personal connection to the 20th century Modernist master – will help us make up our minds in September. That’s when the New York museum opens the first, full-scale retrospective of Kandinsky’s career in the United States since 1985. There’s nothing like ascending the spiral, Frank Lloyd Wright galleries of the Guggenheim to be transported by Kandinsky’s paintings.
Exene Cervenka, best known as singer in famous, long-time L.A. punk rock band X, has also been an artist for the same period of time (30 years?). Her collage and assemblage work conveys some of the same sensibility as her songs. As Western Project gallery in downtown Culver City says about her new show there, look for “remnants from her travels across the US; photographs, children’s books, bullet boxes and other familiar pieces of Americana… pop culture and cosmology illuminating the light and darker aspects of our society.” The exhibit is “We’re Not the Jet Set,” and she shares it with Wayne White, who “paints language on vintage framed lithographs, recalling the intelligence and incisive bite of Mark Twain.” White is also the subject of the recent release: Wayne White: Maybe Now I’ll Get the Respect I So Richly Deserve, edited and designed by Todd Oldham and published by Ammo Books. Show opens July 25.
Cartoonist Robert Crumb elevated the comic book form to high-satire. On July 11, 2009, Grand Central Art Center at California State University Fullerton becomes the only Southern California venue to exhibit the Yerba Buena’s Center for the Arts traveling exhibition, “R. Crumb’s Underground.” The show includes early work, collaborations old and new, and the world premiere of his “spool” drawings. Universally acknowledged as the founder of the underground comic scene, Crumb gained cult popularity for his pioneering Zap Comix and stardom with the Terry Zwigoff documentary, Crumb. According to the museum, the show goes far beyond comics, show how Crumb’s “work has grown in philosophical complexity, and highlights his collaborative work, including intimate confessions produced with wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb.”
Dennis Hopper’s art will always be overshadowed by his films. That only makes his art that much more intriguing. Dennis Hopper Double Standard at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary reveals an artist fully engaged with the aesthetics and issues of his time, although not directly propelling them. The time in question is from the early 1960s through very recently. (Hopper died May 29 of this year.) The largest share of work here are his photographs. They document not only Hollywood and rock music (images of Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones with a sitar, and a young, bikini’d Jane Fonda are among those that are iconic and compelling), but the kinetic Los Angeles art scene and major social issues. These include the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery Freedom March, and the 1967 Sunset Strip curfew riots, which Hopper documented tellingly. Unfortunately, MOCA stacked the hundreds of photos in 20-foot-high towers, making it impossible to get close to some of the best. Why not put the Geffen Contemporary’s cavernous spaces to better use and Read More
The hot-rod artist who became a fine artist – but who never lost his hot-rod roots – has a new show. And now Robert Williams has thrown sculpture into his repertoire. He may be best known for his Guns ‘n Roses album cover, “Appetite for Destruction,” but Williams’ high-brow side has always been just as stimulating as his paintings that riff on movie posters, tattoo iconography, girlie magazines and surfer art. New York’s Tony Shafrazi Gallery is 
Kenny Scharf has made a career out of perverting cartoon imagery and he’s not going to stop now. Born in Hollywood and first gaining fame in the 1980s Manhattan art scene of Fun gallery and beyond, the pop artist particularly fixates upon warped visions of the Flintstones and Jetsons. Scharf’s new show at 
Artist Sandow Birk is at it again. He has established his career by placing classic art and literature in contemporary – often humorous – settings. Birk’s mock-heroic epic, “In Smog and Thunder” portrays Los Angeles and San Francisco at war, in paintings suggestive of 18th century battle portraits. He also recently re-illustrated the entire Divine Comedy by Dante into contemporary American English. Birk’s latest combination of the archetypal with the typical is American Qur’an: exhaustive, hand-illustrations of The Koran, rendered in graffiti-writing style, set against images of contemporary urban America. An exhibition continues at Culver City’s 
Maybe both. And that’s a good thing. Nearly 30 years after the U.S. artist barged on the scene with “readymade”-style installations (a basketball floating in an aquarium) and seemingly kitschy artifacts (a gaudy sculpture of “Michael Jackson with Bubbles” the chimp), cynics are still saying, “That’s not art, that’s just a guy making money.” Koons has certainly made a lot of it. In 2007 Luxist 
Blog Downtown 
Sure, it’s hard to pick one. But the Guggenheim museum – with the best Kandinsky collection anywhere, and the closest personal connection to the 20th century Modernist master – will help us make up our minds in September. That’s when the New York museum opens the first, full-scale 
Exene Cervenka, best known as singer in famous, long-time L.A. punk rock band X, has also been an artist for the same period of time (30 years?). Her collage and assemblage work conveys some of the same sensibility as her songs. As Western Project gallery in downtown Culver City says about 
Cartoonist Robert Crumb elevated the comic book form to high-satire. On July 11, 2009, Grand Central Art Center at California State University Fullerton becomes the only Southern California venue to