Your LA TV

Check out this quick video tour of High and Dry, Smoke and Fog, curated by Price Latimer. In it, my work is glimpsed at and briefly described by Coagula's own Mat Gleason!

Opening At Socrates This Sunday!

Reason #729 to love Socrates Sculpture Park: An awesome crew of Dominican Fishermen got tired of watching and helped Takashi Horisaki with his installation. Image lifted shamelessly off his blog.

You will miss out if you are not at Socrates on Sunday afternoon!

In addition to a possible thunderstorm, there will be great art, and New Orleans-style food and music! And humidity. New Orleans-style humidity. So it will be authentic! Here's the blurb from the press release, copied and pasted for your reading pleasure:

Open Space

Opening Sunday, July 29, 2-6pm

Deborah Fisher
New Orleans Elegy, 2006
July 29-October 28, 2007

Deborah Fisher's New Orleans Elegy is a living work of art that will change over time in its appearance and meaning. Fisher is interested in the structures the earth makes: how crystals grow; accreation; and the way rocks organize and build themselves. New Orleans Elegy is a map of New Orleans made of steel wire "streets" and a bronze overlay. Over time, the interaction of the metals will cause the streets to decay from the bronze leaving only a trace of where they once were.

Takashi Horisaki
Social Dress New Orleans--730 Days After, 2007
July 29-October 28, 2007

Takashi Horisaki's Social Dress New Orleans-
730 days after, came from his deep concern for New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. Horisaki spent his
first three years in America living in New Orleans, LA, eventually earning a BFA from Loyola University. His visit to New York in June 2006 made him realize how much those of us living outside of the victimized area fail to grasp the reality of the tragedy suffered by New Orleans residents and the glacially slow recovery process. Conversations with his professor in New Orleans inspired this project. "He told me how difficult
it is for him to make his own artwork still, and I wondered if I, a neutral person- not exactly an
outsider, but with some perspective on the situation- could express their feelings through my sculpture."


Michael Mercil
Shadows From A Dream Of The 20th Century, 2003-2006
July 29, 2007-April 6, 2008

Michael Mercil's shadows from a dream of the 20th Century, is a set of three carved black stone monoliths. The individual pieces approximate the size of grave markers; stones that mark a beginning of western sculpture. Mercil is not a stone sculptor, but here he uses traditional materials and methods to entertain notions of origin and temporality- of the past, as legacy for the future, and the future already becoming the past. The substance of this work materializes the question: "What is the object of sculpture now?"

Solid State Change: The Home Stretch!

It's getting really really close. On August 6, a big truck is going to come and take it to Vermont! We have lifted and weighed it, and it is only 6000 pounds, which is great news. I don't have to hire a crane! All that's really left now is detail stuff.

Lizz Sullivan, a photographer who was working for the NY Post, came by and took this picture yesterday, and sent it to me. The funny part is that I am relatively clean.

There is an opening at Socrates, Sunday from 2-6pm. Tomorrow I will make a bigger post about it. But put it in your calendar now!

Ben Davis on Tom Friedman Makes Me Wonder: Is It Possible For Any Of Us To Stop Shuckin' And Jivin'?

Tom Friedman, Aluminum Foil Thing, currently on display at Lever House

I know that this article by Ben Davis is ancient in blogosphere terms, but the Tom Friedman extravaganza at the Lever House is still up through September, and I don't know about you, but it's the closest I will be getting to this year's European Summer Art Orgy.

Davis is right on the money--he's focusing on Friedman's relationship to Aby Rosen's power. The briefest of summaries to start:

These deft-shiny-intricate-yet-silly-and-disposable sculptures currently on display at the Lever House are, in Davis' words, "allegories of frivolity, of surplus wealth." Davis notices that there is a smartness to Friedman's sculptural practice that is entreprenurial--Friedman's schtick is to make something out of nothing. But that this smartness does not place him in a critical position, that this work is dedicating itself to power.

Amen, brother Davis! But what about the big picture? We all learned in school that Friedman's ironic strategy here is supposed to be critical of Rosen, even though it obviously is not--what about that? What winds up being the critical or ironical target?

What about all the other good boys and girls just trying to get somewhere in Chelsea? The army of scared kids in skinny jeans carrying nothing more than the crushing debt of their MFA and a quirky little interest in doilies or seafaring tales, or poor, white trash? What's their relationship to power?

What about us?

I think Davis has just scratched the surface here. And that there is a little Friedman in all of us. And that the effects of this kind of court-jesterism are not as benign as we think they are. I know that artists generally consider themselves powerless, but I don't think that's exactly true.

Consider this post a placeholder that asks three questions:

1. What is the propaganda value of art and artists that are good to power by playing bad, edgy, abject or ironic? What exactly are collectors buying when they pay these court jesters?

2. Is it possible to figure out exactly how artists are powerful by looking at how classic artistic strategies of dissent became strategies of dedication?

3. Are artists able, given this existing power structure that has co-opted irony and other kinds of dissent, to truly display bad manners? If so, how?