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Andrew Berardini
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Sheets
by Andrew Berardini
Posted
4/24/13
It all ends in sex or death, usually.
Both even.
I think I've been writing about shadows on bedroom walls and tangled sheets all of my life.
These will, with some likelihood, be my last thoughts as well. The sheets, the crisp unloving whites of a hospital bed, the shadows dancing on the eggshell walls of an antiseptic ward.
But there have been other walls and other sheets. I think it comes from the stillness of being awake in bed. If you immediately roll out, bare feet scraping on hardwood, the... [more]
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Cover Song
by Andrew Berardini
Sam Gilliam at David Kordansky Gallery
March 28th - May 11th
Posted
4/6/13
I want all of Sam Gilliam's paintings here to be book covers.
Perhaps it's because their flatness and angles handily resemble package design of a certain era. I've always felt similarly about Ellsworth Kelly's bright, cheerful paintings that look like they'd been stolen from the detergent aisle and had their explosively optimistic names removed. Gilliam’s paintings on view at David Kordansky look mostly to me like one of the more recent cover designs for JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, which is... [more]
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A last love letter from a sunsetting civilization
by Andrew Berardini
JJ PEET at Redling Fine Art
January 11th - February 23rd
Posted
2/24/13
There's hope this might be seen, yet a humbling acceptance of the vast loneliness of space.
It is a gesture.
A last love letter from a sunsetting civilization, a temple left on an abandoned planet, a spare record jettisoned into the cosmos whispering its enigmas through these worn remnants.
Do words fail? Maybe. So do civilizations. After a people’s peak troughs, do objects reclaim their lost souls? The first and last humans doubtlessly were and will be animists. I wish we had a verb for once... [more]
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GEOslant with Andrew Berardini: The Legend of Georgia Fee
by Andrew Berardini
Posted
2/3/13
Georgia Fee has been and will forever be the most important person in my professional life.
I owe all these words, and all the words that come after these to a woman I had the happy accident to meet one day on Craigslist. I love that lady and miss her painfully.
Every trenchant phrase and heartfelt plea, every joke and every song, every review and every poem has Georgia's fingerprints on them.
She gave me something more valuable than even time or money to a young writer (though she fierce... [more]
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I want you to to go the LA Art Book Fair
by Andrew Berardini
at MOCA Geffen Contemporary
February 1st - February 3rd
Posted
2/1/13
Let's be honest here.
Fuck art fairs. Long live art book fairs.
This weekend Printed Matter opens the first ever LA Art Book Fair. This is important. I want you to go.
Art books are generally everything you wanted art to be but you can actually afford it.
I don't know how much Laura Owen's paintings are going for, more than I make a year or five it's safe to assume, but her book, Fruits and Nuts is available at Ooga Booga for $500; each is its own unique beauty, handmade with love by the art... [more]
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Some Shows We Think You Should See
by Andrew Berardini
Posted
1/24/13
Perhaps the art fair brought you to LA, or maybe you live here but are looking for a little international flavor from the coterie of foreign art dealers caravanning in art from far-flung lands. There is a certain, dynamic allure to any assembly, party, fair. But in the end, nobody really loves an art fair. There's the art fairs in the Grand Palais in Paris, whose beautiful glass dome certainly takes the sting out, but as a rule a convention hall will only ever be a conventional hall: harsh over... [more]
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Take This Personally: Lisa Anne Auerbach
by Andrew Berardini
Posted
11/28/12
"Don't take it personally," a backhanded cliche only firing bosses and leaving lovers sink to say.
Failure, success, love, sex, politics, the environment. These are not vague abstractions. Or at least, they don't have to be.
Take all this personally. Lisa Anne Auerbach does. An erotic sweaterist, a reclaimer of torn porn, cycling zinemaker, artist.
In sizable prints, shredded S&M porn abandoned in an airport parking garage gets blown up, each thread of its frazzled paper, stain on the pelte... [more]
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Caravaggio's John the Baptist in the Wilderness, c. 1604
by Andrew Berardini
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio at LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art
November 11th, 2012 - February 10th
Posted
11/28/12
I almost want to fuck him. Is this John the Baptist? The big JC's notable cousin, claimed second-coming of Elijah and pre-ambler to the messiah, the fiery Jewish prophet, whose head a mere few paintings away gets plattered for the sexy, slithery, fourteen-year-old sexpot Salome? This pale northern European beauty never burned in a Judean summer or strained too strenuously under an imperial Roman yoke; this John, who in the gospel is in the deserts till the moment he manifests to Israel, seems to... [more]
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How to Prepare for Artissima
by Andrew Berardini
Lucas Blalock, Sarah Cain, Giorgio de Chirico, Samara Golden, Mark Hagen, Anthony Lepore, Andrea Longacre-White, Carlo Mollino, Ry Rocklen at The Church of the Holy Shroud (Museo della Sindone)
November 8th, 2012 - November 11th, 2012
Posted
11/5/12
To be honest, I'm not very good at preparing for things.
I do manage to pack socks and a toothbrush, though the only items I figure to be truly indispensable are a passport and maybe some pants.
Everything else can be reckoned with.
I aspire to detail-oriented readiness, long for the interest and ability to compose excel sheets that excel and enumerate neat lists with reassuring checkmarks next to each accomplished task, but this is sadly not the case. I can be distracted by a particularl... [more]
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Sound, Scent and Steam: Michael Parker’s Steam Egg
by Andrew Berardini
Posted
9/18/12
So almost every week for the three wintry months these last two years I’ve participated in an ongoing art project that involved taking off my clothes with strangers, crawling into a mirror-covered, egg-shaped steam chamber, concentratedly sweating until I could no longer take the heat, and then slithering my wet body back into the cool air. Rinse, repeat.
Clement Greenberg never did this.
I did it nearly every week because I loved it, but throughout the experience I’ve been reluctant to write ab... [more]
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Hoards I Have Known
by Andrew Berardini
Liz Glynn at Redling Fine Art
September 7th, 2012 - October 26th, 2012
Posted
9/18/12
I have never seen a real, archeological hoard. I’ve read about them in books, with full-color jewels splayed out on neutral backgrounds laid carefully in protective casings, stacks of silver and bronze coins embossed with Roman emperors, coiled gold snakes for nameless warrior queens. The internet provides hours heaped upon hours of “research” a procrastinator can dig into for the sake of pure meandering scholarship (a hoard of wasted time), giving one visions of buried riches, war loot, lo... [more]
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LA Fall Previews: Indian Summer
by Andrew Berardini
Posted
9/5/12
Motorbike to cemetery, Picnic on wild berries... We'll come back for Indian Summer We'll come back for Indian Summer We'll come back for Indian Summer Cover me with rain.
Beat Happening, Indian Summer
Dip your fingers into the Southwestern paint box and if you run them through the sky across a smeary summer, you'll leave a trail that leads straight to autumn. Rust reds and creamy umbers, a flicker of primrose and pinks that might make a conch shell blush, all flow handily into the br... [more]
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Meet Liz Craft: Psychedelic Mementoes of What Almost Was
by Andrew Berardini
Posted
7/1/12
It’s leftover memories hauled off in a battered boxed, thin with water damage, to the local thrift store and dropped at the backdoor. An abandoned baby, lovingly clad in taffeta and enshrouded in a knit blanket, with nary a note. What, if anything, can be found in the kitsch of capitalism, the leftover detritus of a disposable culture, a transient society? What initial hopefulness and final dejection can be located in their battered bodies? Liz Craft’s excavation of what can be found in the l... [more]
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A Serpentine Rainbow
by Andrew Berardini
Paul Waddell at Night Gallery
June 5th, 2012 - July 3rd, 2012
Posted
6/23/12
Let us examine the rainbow.
A radiant bend of light that gives pause to even the surliest of sailors, the direct route to concealed honeypots glutted with gold, a divine message to Noah that the rinse cycle was completing its global soak, the rainbow is such an easy handle for spectral forces, sublimity and facile poetry that it may even be too obviously beautiful for us to concoct anything better than it, thus making rainbows the stuff of sappy cards and toddler’s television. It’s hard to b... [more]
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Obstacle Course with Occasional Clowns: Kathryn Andrews at Art Parcours, Art Basel
by Andrew Berardini
Posted
6/10/12
For the 3rd time, Art Basel has something this year called Art Parcours Night. It's not de rigeur to admit aloud that you don't know something, but I had to look up the definition of "parcours." I asked my good friend/slave-driving nemesis -- the Internet -- and according to wikipedia, a "parcours" is "a physical discipline and non-competitive sport which focuses on efficient movement around obstacles."
In other words, a working definition of an art fair. Some conjecture/complain/lament, that the modern art... [more]
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Painted with Candy, Washed in Acid: An Elliptical Review
by Andrew Berardini
Dasha Shishkin at SUSANNE VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES PROJECTS
April 7th, 2012 - May 12th, 2012
Posted
4/25/12
Henry Darger, R. Crumb, and George Grosz all found themselves, elbow-to-elbow, drinking hard at the same shitty bar.
“Ach! This place is such a stinking pit of depravity!” said Grosz. “Nothing but the most nauseating perverts and prostitutes, corpulent capitalists assfucking priests and army men. Disgusting.” He growled and then took a deep draught of his golden beer, licking the foam off his lip. A roach crawled up to a splash of wet beer on the bar and Grosz brushed it off with a resign... [more]
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A Biennial Timeline
by Andrew Berardini
Posted
3/25/12
After reading over eighty years of articles about the Whitney Museum of American Art's series of annuals and biennials, one almost wonders, "Could they actually have been that bad?" Exempting this latest edition, the Whitney has, so as we can tell, the longest ongoing tradition in contemporary art of people really, really hating it.
In an act of rebellion, we've decided to love the Whitney Biennial, not piece-by-piece, but the whole institution. We've always had a soft spot for unloveables.
What follows... [more]
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Color is part of reality
by Andrew Berardini
Mel Bochner at Marc Selwyn Fine Art
March 17th, 2012 - April 27th, 2012
Posted
3/24/12
It is a game made with beautiful hunks of glass and written with chalk on the floor, some kind of conceptual art hopscotch. One probably shouldn't hop though. Each arrangement is a different play on numbers and markers, of how space works in fantastically simple reduction, a theory of sculpture, or so the title implies. I see it, and then I read it. Then I compare what I read to what I see. This a simple one. Glass and chalk. So basic, but with a beautiful simplicity that has that great gush of... [more]
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Greetings from Beautiful Ader Falls
by Andrew Berardini
Posted
2/26/12
In one of his notebook entries, [Bas Jan] Ader jotted an idea for a postcard: "Greetings from Beautiful Ader Falls." More ominously, he wrote, "All is falling." --Bruce Hainley, “Legends of the Fall,” Artforum, March 1999
In the far western hinterlands of old New Amsterdam, just past the fraying edge of the California sprawl, languishes the twilight township of Ader Falls. A phantom truck stop often missed on the long, lonesome interstate between Los Angeles and New York, this forgotten village f... [more]
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More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid
by Andrew Berardini
Mike Kelley at Carport on Tipton Way Near Figueroa
February 23rd, 2012 - March 31st, 2012
Posted
2/23/12
Yes, we made that. Together and apart, under a spectral influence. There was one soul who started it and another and another, all of it combining and agglomerating, collected compassion, unabashed sentimentality, gratitude and grief. Neither elitist nor crass, all at once scruffy and cleansing, soft and hard. A shrine, maybe, even if it enshrined would handily sneer at his affiliation with such roadside divinity. Not unlike the working class, from which he and many of us come, artists often work with... [more]
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Fairs are Great and Everything, But If You're in Madrid, These Are Probably Better.
by Andrew Berardini
Gregor Schneider at CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo
October 28th, 2011 - February 26th, 2012
Posted
2/16/12
So you're probably there, in Madrid, for the art fair. You quite possibly live there already with a rich and fulfilling cultural life in the Spanish capital, eating lots of tapas and various parts of pigs (like Jamon Jamon Lays potato chips, so porkful in Spain they have to say it twice). But it's likely if you're reading this, it's because of ARCO, one of the grand old art fairs and one of the most important dates in the Spanish art calendar. The fair is a monster. The professional days are pr... [more]
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Ad Astra
by Andrew Berardini
David von Schlegell at International Art Objects Galleries
January 7th, 2012 - February 4th, 2012
Posted
1/31/12
I’m not sure that anything ever looks like the thing you’re supposed to be looking at.
Looking at the paintings of David von Schlegell (1920-1992) I know I can’t be seeing what he saw, though there is no way truly to be sure. Monochromes that fade from corner to corner along a diagonal crest with ragged edges of picture plane pooled with paint, sometimes edged with warm grain of smooth wood, the paintings look nothing like paintings to me, but other much stranger sights. They are sc... [more]
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An Honest Schedule
by Andrew Berardini
Group Show at Pacific Standard Time Festival
January 19th, 2012 12:00 PM - 10:00 PM
Posted
1/18/12
The climax of all this Pacific Standard Timing is here. Funded (like much of PST) mostly by the Getty, the PST Festival of Performance and Public Art stretches an official ten days (January 19-29) from the beach to Pomona and many environs in-between. Like all festivals, there’s always more than you could possibly see. And like all festivals the demand to make a schedule is paramount and declaring it to others helps ensure that wants and wishes become reality. So here’s a bit of a curated schedu... [more]
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Wall Works
by Andrew Berardini
Fiona Connor at Various Small Fires
January 7th, 2012 - February 12th, 2012
Posted
1/10/12
Yes, the walls were moving. Not the four holding up the ceiling, but some other walls in the room, fugitive, unstuck, wandering the space freely. You’re not supposed to touch art (at least in the white cube-ish rules), but they’re walls so maybe you turn your back to it, and then maybe, as happens after so long standing, you maybe start to lean. So maybe you just lean ever so slightly against the wall and the thing shudders, wheels, you catch yourself from continuing the lean-cum-graceless collapse t... [more]
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Exactly Five Things from Farflung Places Seen in 2011
by Andrew Berardini
Posted
1/3/12
1: The Lonesomest Moai in Los Angeles
On top of a hill in Glendale, there's a cemetery special in the world, not only because it inspired Evelyn Waugh to pen a comic novel about it ("The Loved Ones") but because it has turned the theater of death into a distinctly California creation. Besides the largest painting mounted on canvas in the world with its own mock-church viewing theater and sundry themed stretches of plots, there is a museum hosting a coterie of odd, disparate objects all arranged w... [more]
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A Year in Art-cum-Movie Poster Quotes
by Andrew Berardini
Posted
12/27/11
Art critics are never quite shilled in the same way as critics for other avenues of culture. Yes, our reviews likely get listed on CVs and not read, adding some vague imprimatur to an artist's career that might help move some product, but we're never exploited in quite the same way, as say, the movie critic, whose thoughtful well-composed reviews (okay not always) get diced into a few words to grace a promotional poster. Oh, if only some art critic (someone from October would be nice, or Texte Zur Kunst ... [more]
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Portable Objects from Southeast Los Angeles
by Andrew Berardini
at Cleveland Museum of Art
April 16th, 2011 - February 26th, 2012
Posted
12/19/11
1
LighterAngeleno people, North AmericaPlastic, metalPrivate Collection
The lighter’s considerable wear and tear is an obvious sign of intense use. Often, as a result of continuous handling, the translucency of the lighter darkens over time and receives a deep, glossy patina through scratching associated with overuse. Lighters were frequently acquired at local locations by its original owner or as gifts to maintain harmonious family or kinship ties. As prized daily possessions, lighters... [more]
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The Pataphysics of Dr (illegible)
by Andrew Berardini
Erik Frydenborg at Cherry and Martin
November 5th, 2011 - December 17th, 2011
Posted
12/12/11
One solution is as good as another; if it’s even a puzzle or needs explication, which remains debatable. Possible Uses of the Design in Question:a) A proto-DARPA experimental device developed by top engineers under the influence of LSD to channel orgones into potent ”love bombs” which when deployed on the populace of an enemy state caused all those exposed to strip and engage in mass orgies. Deployment was eminent, but the device physically disappeared under the Kennedy Administration and its resea... [more]
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In the Shadows of Children, Playing
by Andrew Berardini
Ralph Eugene Meatyard at de Young Museum
October 8th, 2011 - February 26th, 2012
Posted
11/21/11
A shirtless boy stands in front of a dilapidated house, his face blank, clutched in one hand a doll, in the other a disembodied arm arced as if the adult to whom it belonged had suddenly disappeared. A skull looks over him up near the front column, a mannequin head pokes out of the unkempt grass just a few feet away, another strange weed in this wild garden. What is that in the bush to the left, is it a bag? Hard to tell. What is he doing here? Who is he waiting for? All the skulls and heads and... [more]
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Chimerical Coitions
by Andrew Berardini
Aaron Curry, Richard Hawkins at David Kordansky Gallery
October 28th, 2011 - December 10th, 2011
Posted
11/15/11
Chimera gets close to capturing it. Not in that figurative sense of the impossible wished for thing, but in the old, weird Greek definition of chimera: a fire-breathing female monster, part lion, goat, and serpent, combined together in ways that are invariably wonky, the goat's head poking out of the lion’s back or the lion's head poking out of the goat’s neck, the snake lending itself formally to always simply being the tail. The fact that’s totally mythical to the side, I always wondered... [more]
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