Lyra Kilston is a writer and 3rd generation Angeleno. She tweets at @lyra_k, and writes for Art in America, Artforum.com, Icon, and Art Review.
Narcotic-riffing duo Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe have been at it again, creating an immersive drug den abandoned to time and decay. After staging their faux meth labs in Marfa, Miami, and New York, they’ve moved onto a fictional narcotic, Marasa, and an invented cult figure, Dr. Arthur Cook. Like previous projects, this new installation, Bright White Underground, is a serious gesamtkunstwerk, man.
This summer, I tried to go see a free David Byrne concert in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park but to no avail.
The next morning I looked up the concert online and immediately found masses of documentation … the concert had been reconstructed online so thoroughly that I didn’t really feel like I’d missed it.
What happens when in the name of art you ride through Manhattan in a truck hauling ginormous letters that spell the word NO? Lyra finds out.
Recess opened on Grand Street in September as a storefront artist residency space open to the public, and their inaugural show by Corin Hewitt and Molly McFadden, Double Room, tackles questions of replication, authorship, documentation, labor-as-performance, and collaboration.
Ah, the e-flux email list, ever full of surprises. One day it might elicit a cri de couer of indignation (“really?”), and the next day just a dramatic eye-roll. Sure it’s a very useful tool, but it’s also chock-full of self-important curatorial jargon, exaggerated claims, and overblown PR-ese…Which brings us to Hyperallergic’s new semi-regular feature: Worst. Press. Release. Ever.
Much has been written about the traveling exhibition The Americans, but here’s a recap: Swiss photographer Robert Frank won a Guggenheim fellowship and drove around the United States in 1955-56 taking pictures. His book The Americans, with a forward by Jack Kerouac, was published in 1959, and met with acclaim and controversy. Some people didn’t like the America that Frank saw. On the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication, the entire series has been shown at several U.S. venues, and is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
From images of a funeral in South Carolina to a wedding chapel in Reno, Frank revealed a nation that looked burdened, anxious, and lost.
For Alex Bag’s current solo show, Reality Tunnel Vision, the front room of Elizabeth Dee gallery is wrapped with forest-patterned wallpaper on one side (curling off the wall at the far end), dead plants hanging from the wall, some dead bamboo sticking out of dirt on the gallery floor, an old barbeque, and a few drawings. The drawings, sketched in a cartoony crudeness, depict some of the despicable characters currently swarming our cable channel reality TV shows, such as puffy-lipped Barbie-women with impossibly huge breasts, or the muscled, faux-hawked, tattooed men who compete on national television for a chance at “true love,” money, or their own spin-off show.
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