Michael Maas
Michael Maas is a Fallbrook-based painter. Over the past 15 years he’s shown extensively in Southern California, most recently at L2Kontemporary in Chinatown. He has another show this month at Bunny Gunner in Pomona. Maas is best known for his Alhambra series, over 200 paintings which deploy a common abstract motif — a...
Wall
Let no man go out of his place on the seventh day. – Exodus 16:29 The wall encloses an area south of UCSD, roughly two miles long and one mile wide. On the north it borders La Jolla Village Drive, on the south La Jolla Parkway, on the west Torrey Pines Road, and...
Prole Drift: Jean Lowe and the Great Recession
1. In 1983 the historian Paul Fussell penned a minor classic of social satire titled Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. In it he dissects a myriad of class signifiers – housing, decor, transportation, diet, dress, posture, physiognomy, demeanor, vocabulary, religion, career, education, recreation – and from this deduces the following: –...
Making WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing
Leonard Koren is the author of Making WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing , the definitive history of WET Magazine, the iconic and innovative magazine he published from 1976 – 1981 out of Venice Beach, California. Polymorphously perverse, cheeky, flirtatiously Hollywood and beautifully designed, WET Magazine was an extension of Koren’s own quirky and enigmamtic...
Mark Dery Interview
Mark Dery has been exploring the shifting sands of American sub-cultural trends for almost twenty years. He has built a reputation as an engaged and voluble critic hailed for his urbane, funny observations delivered with clear-eyed reason. His new book, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams features thirty-two...
scott b. davis
scott b. davis has earned a national reputation for his night photography. The San Diego Museum of Art is currently exhibiting a survey of his work from the past decade. And a show of recent work opens in March at jdc Fine Art. A recent profile of davis in the Summerset Review offers a wonderfully...
Leonard Koren Interview: Making WET
Leonard Koren published WET Magazine for 5 1/2 years between 1976 and 1981 as part of a creative and philosophical experiment he called “gourmet bathing.” WET Magazine became his primary vehicle of expression during that time. Overt definition equals death for artistic ideas so Leonard has maintained a refusal to define explicitly what gourmet bathing...
Thanks for the experience
Turn on/Tune in/Drop out/Log on The awesomeness of Steve Jobs has been given a canonical accounting with the publication of Walter Isaacson’s 570-page authorized biography of his life. So just how did Jobs transmogrify the world? The CEO Messiah of User Experience claimed he did it by standing at the intersection of technology and liberal...
Poem for Dita
On September 10, 2011 Dita von Teese performed her burlesque show at MCASD’s Monte Carlo fundraising event. POEM FOR DITA Dita’s in the art (museum) Doing illicit things America Divine intervening trance-angel Dancing imploring titillating attracting Devotion – is this Art? Devolution? Innovation? Transcendence? Adult Disneyland? Intelligentsia take aim! Diotema in the alley Daring imitation...
Into the Temple of Art
OF TIME AND SPACE, ART’S ASSUMPTION INTO THE MARKETPLACE AND WERNER HERZOG’S CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS It is the Monday night after the close of Art San Diego 2011 contemporary art fair and time to reflect on my pilgrimage to the ad hoc temple of art at the Hilton Bay Front. Four days of initiation...
Joe Yorty: The Art of Boredom
We all know what it feels like to be stuck in a line. In the supermarket, at the bus stop, or at the doctors office. You find yourself slowly surrendering to the situation and becoming reconciled to doing nothing, feeling nothing, saying nothing, being nothing. Time passes so slowly it starts to become physical. Your...
Adult Puppet Cabaret (next one’s fri 7/29)
The last time that I stepped into the Adult Puppet Cabaret (a previous rendition), I had one of those, “Jesus Christ, is this really San Diego?” moments. The unmarked warehouse located in a quiet, unassuming, industrial part of town, seemed as if it had been teleported from… well, lets just say from a larger, more...
Where’s the Dignity in Labor?
In the sense that I have continued to dwell on the “Dignity of Labor,” I would say that it was a success. Featuring work by artists Brian Zimmerman and John Dillemuth installed amongst SDMA’s collections and spaces, a screening of the documentary Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class and a live performance by...
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Until recently my exposure to anime had consisted primarily of a satisfying addiction to anything Miyazaki. But then I learned of Neon Genesis Evangelion, an anime series written and directed by Hideaki Anno which spans 11 hours of television episodes and a concluding movie. If Miyazaki’s work embodies classical art cinema à la Kurosawa, NGE...
David Fobes at Athenaeum
David Fobes‘s show at the Athenaeum is titled Code-O-Chromes, signaling its delicious conflation of color, op, painting, quilting, and CGI. (A conflation so rich one hapless critic panned the show for asserting that “painting is dead,” when in fact it contains two works rendered in… paint.) The key to the show — and the...