Raoul De Keyser (1930-2012)
“I don’t want to become the ‘pretty’ painter … Ultimately I want to paint ruthlessly.”
Ken Price at LACMA
“You don’t have to act serious to be serious” –Ken Price One of my favorite shows of the year. On view at LACMA until January 6!
Lucy Dodd, Oceanic Carnage
NYC-based artist Lucy Indiana Dodd explores the performative, kinetic and the found dimensions to the genres of installation, textiles and painting. She took part in the Cirrus Gallery group show, All Human Actions (September 2007) with Dawn Kasper and Mimi Lauter and featured in May Day Performance Event at Human Resources in LA’s Chinatown (May […]
Chasing Mavericks on 7th Ave
Supposedly this wave is “actual size.” Chasing Mavericks opens on October 26.
“Next Stop:” Nosara
Writer Bonnie Tsui reports on her recent trip to Nosara in the “Next Stop” column of the New York Times‘s Travel section. The article mostly focuses on the surf schools, and her experiences: During a week in Nosara surfing with Mr. Hill and his crew, I became a bit of a surf nerd, learning the finer […]
Obama’s Way
From Michael Lewis’s recent article in Vanity Fair: Aboard Air Force One, I’d asked him what he would do if granted a day when no one knew who he was and he could do whatever he pleased. How would he spend it? He didn’t even have to think about it: When I lived in Hawaii, […]
Warhol’s Surf Film to Premiere at MoMA in October
Artdaily brings us some good news via the Andy Warhol Museum: Warhol’s film San Diego Surf will have its world premiere screening at The Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday, October 16, 2012. San Diego Surf was filmed in La Jolla, California, about 30 miles down the coast from Los Angeles, in May, 1968. It was filmed in […]
Robert Adams, On Any Given Day in Spring (I)
Don’t miss this show at Matthew Marks Gallery, which is on view until November 3. Adams’s traveling retrospective is also currently at the Yale University Art Gallery, until October 28. From a recent interview: I’ve been asked why I didn’t keep making pictures in the suburbs. I think the answer is that, at some level, I hoped early […]
Earthquake News from Voz de Nosara
We’re grateful to the Voz de Nosara for updates about last week’s earthquake. More news from the Costa Rican Red Cross here.
Eleanor Antin, 100 Boots Facing the Sea
MS. ANTIN: But I was tired of traveling into New York to show. I thought I’ve got to do a piece that can get around the world without me, so I can stay here. I loved old San Diego before the McMansions came in. I lived over the ocean. I didn’t even drive in those […]
The New Yorker on Mud Wrestling in the Rockaways
Move over New York Times, now the New Yorker seems to have a beat reporter in the Rockaways. Have a look at this article by Mary Norris on mud wrestling at the Rockaway Beach Surf Club. An excerpt: The Rockaway Beach Surf Club is on the premises of a former chop shop at Beach Eighty-seventh Street, under […]
Koji Enokura, Symptom-Sea-Body (P.W.-No. 40)
A favorite work from “Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha.” The exhibition, which began at Blum and Poe in Los Angeles and traveled to Gladstone Gallery in New York, examined the postwar Japanese artistic phenomenon Mono-ha (School of Things). According to a press release “Requiem for the Sun” refers to “the attitude of aesthetic […]
Hans Haacke, Wide White Flow
… make something which experiences, reacts to its environment, changes, is non-stable… … make something indeterminate, which always looks different, the shape of which cannot be predicted precisely… … make something which cannot ‘perform’ without the assistance of its environment… … make something which reacts to light and temperature changes, is subject to air currents […]
Leanne Shapton’s “Swimming Studies”
The New Yorker has posted a slideshow from Leanne Shapton’s new book Swimming Studies. Jordan Awan writes: Toward the end of the book is a chapter titled simply “Swimming Pools.” It’s a series of seventy-two paintings, each one representing a pool that Shapton remembers swimming in. The paintings abstract the pools to their surface shape, which […]
Bushwick on the Beach
The New York Times is apparently in love with Rockaway Beach. Several articles this summer have celebrated our new “Bushwick on the Beach,” such as “Boardwalk? Try Catwalk” by Guy Trebay in June. Just a few weeks ago there was this riveting article about what happens when the sun goes down: As the sun dips below the […]
Franz West, 1947-2012
The Austrian artist Franz West passed away on July 25. Peter Schjeldahl‘s obit in the New Yorker is a poignant and spot on read: The death in Vienna on Thursday of the sneaky-great Austrian artist Franz West—at the age of sixty-five, after a long illness—saddens me to a degree that I’m afraid needs explaining. The circle of West’s fans […]
Pura Vida Raw Foods
Pura Vida Raw Foods in Playa Guiones is a must! On a recent trip, Frankie—the owner/master chef—treated a group of us to a tasting of all of his delicious concoctions. From dehydrated pineapple chips to his signature “sushi” rolls of compressed and sliced raw organic chocolate and fruit. And good to know: the Ca$hew-Buttah Cups and […]
Ostional Wildlife Reserve
A few pictures from our visit to Ostional Wildlife Reserve on a cloudy, overcast afternoon. According to nicoyapeninsula.com: The beach of Ostional is the scenery for a rarely-seen biological wonder. The week before new moon hundreds, and sometimes hundreds of thousand sea turtles come to one specific mile of beach at Ostional to dig their eggs […]
Stephanie Gilmore’s Surf-Beauty Tips
T Magazine has some helpful beauty tips from twenty-four-year-old Stephanie Gilmore, the Aussie pro surfer who just won her fifth ASP Women’s World title. J.E-L.: Which products do you use? S.G.: My skin is pretty sensitive and the saltwater dries it out. Sunscreens can clog your pores, and then, because the saltwater is cleansing your skin anyway, […]
Sgrafo vs. Fat Lava
A taste from a not-to-be-missed show of ceramics and porcelains made in West Germany, ca. 1960-1980. Curated by Nicolas Trembley at Alex Zachary Peter Currie in NYC. Closes Saturday! The installation views.
William Wegman, For A Moment He Forgot Where He Was And Jumped Into The Ocean, 1971
William Wegman’s solo exhibition “Hello Nature” runs from July 13 to October 21 the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine. (Though this photograph isn’t in the show it’s one of my favorite works by him.) The exhibition features some thirty years of work inspired by Maine, where the artist spends his summers. Read a recent interview […]
World’s 20 Best Surf Towns: Nosara!
Nosara has been named one of the 20 best surf towns by National Geographic!
“Jack Goldstein X 10,000”
Until September 9 at OCMA: This exhibition is the first American retrospective of Jack Goldstein (1945–2003), a central figure in Postmodernist discourse of the 1970s and 1980s. Goldstein’s oeuvre developed over the years in an unusual breadth of media, from sculpture, performance, and film, to photography, records of sound effects, paintings, and aphorisms. The exhibition […]
