Turn Your Back on Rick Warren

Imagine -
On Inaugural day, everyone in Washington turns their back on him.
Perfect.

Last day for Art

On Nov. 15 we went to LACMA to see Machine Project's Field Guide to LACMA and it was a fun way to spend the day. Part of the reason was that the activities - scattered around the LACMA campus allowed you to see some art and galleries that you normally just avoided because let's face it, not only is LACMA blessed with the most hideous buildings for housing art (don't get me started on that - including the new Broad) but the collection isn't first rate, so you have a lot of second tier work from first tier artists or you have work from really justifiably obscure adherents to historical art movements. Though I do like the Georges de la Tour Magdalene a great deal - but it's sandwiched between such terrible work that I forget to go visit it. But to be in a room of rather okay religious works from the 1500 - 1700s and to hear Lewis Keller's Thornton Room Rumble Modification was great. The live re-mix of the ambient air conditioning system of the Ahmanson building lent a direness and urgency - a sense of dread to these paintings. The Musical Elevator was funny. And the Gothic Arch Speed Metal - one minute of speed metal from the roof of a building - complete with Gothic Arch and smoke machine was totally hilarious. My favorite piece was the Peeping Netsuke by Jason Torchinsky - Netsukes being these little hand carved ivory talismans from Japan. In the Japanese pavilion you went into the Netsuke exhibit room which has hundreds of these little carved figurines in little boxes and suddenly you see a photo of a large one popping up outside the window. Walking to the photo you look outside and discover the apparatus - a hand made machine - powering a slowly turning bicycle wheel that has the Netsuke photo attached. It causes the photo to appear and then disappear - all with a sly wink to Marcel Duchamp. Great fun.
In another element that would bring joy to the Dadaists - the throngs of people walking around behaving in a most un-museum goer like ways had some of the more uptight guards in a tizzy. As people snapped photos of performers and talked on cell phones they would be chastised by the ignored guards desperately trying to enforce rules.

We also saw the Martin Kippenberger and Louise Bourgeois shows at LACMA. Kippenberger reminded me of RW FAssbinder - prolific, intense, obsessed and lost. Seeing all the Bourgeois pieces together, the limp structures with the hard materials was all together creepy and made you wonder about her childhood, which the accompanying materials hinted at was dark without elucidating with specifics.

Finally we popped off last week to the Hammer to see the woodcuts and the Oranges and Sardines exhibits. Oranges and Sardines takes abstract work as it's starting points and asks several abstract painters to select two pieces of their own and then several ones that influenced them. This is an interesting idea that resulted in a completely uninteresting show. Which is I guess why curators have jobs. However Gouge the woodcut show was an excellent example of why we need curators. There was an idea for the show, excellent examples that displayed that idea and crisp language inviting the viewer to understand and wonder. My particular favorite was a print that was just a sinuous black line wandering down the page. This line depicts the map's border between India and Pakistan with the rest of the picture being gouged out into nothingness - the empty space, the negative space on either side of the border. Killer. Best thing I've seen in years.

I can't Imagine A Better President to Throw Your Shoe At

And while we're at it, I want to send the moving van to the white house to pack the Bushies up and get them out of Washington today. Wouldn't it be great if a Mayflower moving van just arrived today and 20 workers got out and just packed them up and shipped them off? Let's get them out of there before the 20th! And let's throw shoes at them the entire way. Maybe Imelda Marcos can loan us some shoes. And did you notice? He didn't even seem to realize that this was an insult? I mean I didn't know that shoes and the soles of shoes was an insult in Iraq until after we invaded the country and killed all those civilians, but after we did I found out that it's an insult. You'd think that something about the culture of the country he invaded for no reason other than a neo-con's say so would have sunk in. What a fucking embarrassment.