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FAIR AND SQUARE

Post-Fair Brings Equitability to Santa Monica

Jocelyn Silver

LESS THAN ZERO

On Risk and Art in Los Angeles

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FASHION AT FRIEZE

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COLLISION ENSURES REACTION

Getty PST Art & Science Collide

Anuradha Vikram

DUELLING REVIEWS: DOUG AITKEN

Two takes on Doug Aitken’s Lightscape at the Marciano Art Foundation and “Psychic Debris

Field” at Regen Projects

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“LoS AngeleS iS 72 SuburbS in

Search of a city.” —Dorothy Parker

January is always a quiet month for the Los Angeles art world, but it was made even quieter this year by natural disaster—the fires shut down many art institutions while the city grappled with destruction—and the gloom of the national political situation, which depressed an already down-andout town. There were fire fundraisers, of course, and I made an effort to catch a few winter gallery shows before they closed, but with the exception of Paul McCarthy’s Tomato Head at Jeffrey Deitch and Betye Saar’s incredible Mojotech at Roberts Projects, nothing was hitting. Notably, both of those artworks were made over three decades ago, which only deepened my longing to be alive at some time other than here and now. ¶ So, I retreated into what everyone else was doing and spent hours listening to politically oriented podcasts in the hopes that someone could explain how Silicon Valley rationalists, Claremontbased Christian neo-imperialists, Lower East Side shitposters, and Stefan

SEARCH IN OF A

are all connected. By late January, I had connected all the dots and planned to deploy my grand theory in the 800 words of this column (you’re welcome!). But then February happened, and I went out drinking for seven nights in a row during Frieze Week LA, reducing myself to a smoothbrained complacency. At this point, I can’t digest anything unless it comes on a cocktail napkin. ¶ What I had wanted to write about when I felt smarter—and will now attempt to reconstruct despite my hangover— is that our great nation is having a serious California moment, but the wrong kind of California moment. Representatives from the wrong city— Silicon Valley–trashed San Francisco—have ascended to power, bringing with them the promise of world-dominating scientific supremacy,

Simchowitz

CITYof AI farms on Mars, of a Cybertruck in every driveway and Soylent in every pot. They promise to rid our streets of foreign nationals and do other nefarious shit we’ve all read about, which I don’t need to reprise here. But most of all, they promise to just do things, to break things and get messy, startup-style. ¶ Musk and company have sold these actions as antigovernment, but I think the truth is that after a couple of decades of getting the short shrift in D.C., California’s Founders decided they actually needed to become more political themselves. They aren’t trying to eliminate the government so much as to use it to get the regulatory situation they want. The political language around just doing things actually predates them—I trace it to how Karl Rove and the neocons talked about Iraq—but regardless of its origin, it sets up a strange dichotomy: Those who Just Do Things on the libertarian Right, and those who consider their actions on the authoritarian Left. Where are artists supposed to land in this? With the skaters or the librarians? ¶ Just doing things is classic Cali. Here in California, we have no allegiance to history, no God or the wrong God, and plenty of drugs—a combination that usually gets it done, for better or worse. Now we are seeing where that potent California energy, combined with scientific positivism, gets us—to a heinous, beauty-free world full of ChatGPTese and Waymos. ¶ But imagine the world if, instead of rationalism + Silicon Valley California, we had exported to D.C. what Los Angeles has to offer: anti-rationalism + the chaos of Southern California. We do things differently here in Los Angeles, and with no less power. We prize beauty and sex. The mysteries of the desert and the threat of the ocean. The tricks of the silver screen. Who do you think taught all those fucks in Silicon Valley that sign and signifier might not be connected? And our artists are insane (as Diva corp aptly points out in their article in this issue on risk-taking and art—this is the city that made Chris Martin!). ¶ If art is the interpretation of science, we have never more desperately needed art that interprets science. To get us out of this mess, spiritually speaking. I hope that Los Angeles’s artists are the ones to do it—I actually think we are the only ones poised to fully understand the dastardly semiotics of the current political situation—but first, we’ll have to recover from our hangovers. Eileen Havant Townsend

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HOP LOUIE

KNOWN GALLERY

HOLLYWOOD ROOSEVELT HOTEL

BRAZZERS AT THE

FELIX ART FAIR NICODIM

ND FAIR AND SQUARE

POST-FAIR BRINGS EQUITABILITY TO SANTA MONICA

BY JOCELYN SILVER

Last week, during Los Angeles Art Week, I saw James Franco everywhere. I saw James Franco at Felix at the Hollywood Roosevelt, where the David Hockney-painted pool was closed because a man had had a heart attack inside it the day before. I saw James Franco at the Karma party at Ghengis Cohen, his trucker hat popping up behind a psychic and very beautiful astrologer. I saw James Franco at Frieze, taking in the valuable wall real estate at the sizable David Zwirner booth. But the first place I saw James Franco smile was at the inaugural Post-Fair in Santa Monica, as Theta gallery founder and director Jordan Barse took him through her exhibition of Tinseltown-themed paintings by Pictures Generation artist Nancy Dwyer. I smiled at the Post-Fair, too.

The Post-Fair, a little jewel box of a fair held at the landmark Santa Monica Post Office building, was founded by Mid-City gallerist Chris Sharp, a dealer with excellent taste and an aptronym for a surname. He decided to start his own fair for a simple reason: Frieze, where the price of a small booth starts at $35,000, is just too expensive. Participating in that fair, or even its somewhat less costly alternative, Felix, can knock out an emerging gallery like Sharp’s, whose business is four years old. He aimed for something more equitable than the established fairs, splitting the cost of renting the post office between 26 galleries (all showing single-artist presentations) for a flat rate of $6,000 each.

“We’re in a moment where things are so difficult,” he says. “Survival feels so precarious and the market’s so weak, so I just wanted to create something where participating in it wasn’t an existential threat to the gallery. Because a lot of the time, when you’re doing these big fairs it’s make or break, just because the costs are so high.”

“To use Marxist terminology,” he says, chuckling, “we’re seizing the means of production.” The name really works.

Sharp’s fellow gallerists met the idea with enthusiasm. He invited galleries ranging from decades-old, established institutions like Sprüth Magers and PPOW, to far younger galleries, like the Dimes Square-adjacent King’s Leap, and CASTLE, which opened in a Hancock Park apartment less than two years ago. Instead of constructing conventional booths, each gallery received equitable wall space, lending the fair the feeling of a group show. The 1938 building, sun-soaked with Art Deco moldings and worn stone, was a pleasure to move through, especially in comparison to the claustrophobic convention center at the Santa Monica Airport. Numerous guests commented on how nice the space smelled, like fresh cut wood.

“It’s a really beautiful space, and the flow is nice and pleasant,” says Barse. “I love the scale of it. It just feels very manageable, whereas many fairs can feel very overwhelming and exhausting, with layouts that make you feel trapped. But I think that people flow through quite naturally here without

feeling pressured or rushed. You’re engaging visitors more easily, and they have time to stop and chat about the art.”

Eden Deering, director of PPOW—which showed Harry Gould Harvey IV’s storybook-like, eerie work—described the Post-Fair as “refreshingly human.”

“It avoided the often transactional feel of white-walled booths,” she says. “Instead, it offered a sense of discovery and connection.”

Between the low costs and minimal construction, Sharp purposefully created an environment where there’s “a lot less pressure” to make sales, enabling exhibitors to take more aesthetic risk. He opted to show work by the late German-Iraqi sculptor Lin May Saeed, centering a piece depicting a wide-eyed, nervous doe. Sharp says that, despite Saeed’s renown in Europe, she has no market in the United States, and he relished the opportunity to bring her to a wider audience.

“I actually really like art fairs,” he says. “A lot of people complain about them, but one of their great virtues is you get a lot of people in front of your work. At my gallery, I’m lucky if I get 300 people to visit the show over the course of the entire show. You do an art fair, and you get thousands of people. I mean, not like everyone’s going to look, but you’re still getting this really high volume of exposure for your artists. So this fair is a perfect context to be able to show work by Lin May Saeed, where if we don’t sell anything, it’s not a big deal.”

Sharp expected some amount of blowback from the powers that be at Frieze. But the devastating Los Angeles

wildfires changed things. “My fair feels like it’s essentially somehow critical of the status quo, but the fires and the aftermath kind of created this really nice and unexpected solidarity among the entire art community,” he says. In 2025, attending LA Art Week was not just an excuse to take pictures of one’s friends’ art and enjoy a complimentary champagne in a lounge sponsored by a Swiss bank— instead, it became a way to both offer real, needed support to the city’s artists and art workers, and to blow off steam and have fun. People actually danced (and made out on the dance floor) at the Hop Louie party. Everyone needed to breathe, maybe even the James Francos of the world.

CASTLE founder Harley Wertheimer, who exhibited paintings by Victor Boullet at the Post-Fair (my favorite was of a charming little owl with red-rimmed eyes), says we need people coming to LA in the wake of such tragedy. “I don’t even think it’s a purely financial thing,” he says. “It’s also an energy thing. It’s a beautiful city filled with beautiful, hardworking people who work in the arts, and their work should be seen.”

Post-Fair’s spirit of experimentation leaked over into Art Week as a whole. The New York-based Uhaul Gallery, which shows work in a moving van, parked outside the Santa Monica Post Office after getting ejected from Frieze. There was an inflatable tube man, like the kind they display outside car dealerships, waving around atop the van, by artist Sam Keller. He was rendered in the stars and stripes of the American flag, with an erect, inflatable tube penis flopping in the breeze. He made me happy.

Images by Artillery staff.

New from X Artists’ Books

Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean

Edited by Cassandra Coblentz

Co-Published with Oceanside Museum of Art

Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream…

Edited by Denise Markonish

Co-Published with Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

Paul McCarthy, The Garden , 1991-1992.

Photo: Joshua White / JW Pictures. Collection of Jeffrey Deitch. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Paul McCarthy.

I’m

at a bar in Palmdale and it’s nearly empty. From where I am sitting, I can see two men playing chess. Or, rather, they’re not really playing—they’re afraid to make a move. It’s Pawn to E4, followed by the all-too-familiar analysis paralysis: finger steadies the piece, eyes tighten, neck cranes and turtles to check for danger, and then… Pawn back to E2. Let’s start again. Every move never happens, just like this.

It’s a riskless game, and stagnant, and it reminds me of the state of the arts in Los Angeles.

Since forever, LA has been about risk. We tell big stories on big screens about success against all odds. Our stars come from nowhere, move here on hayseed budgets with bindles full of aspiration and little else. Our freeways host the most spine-shearing car chases in the world; our sports are considered extreme, our politics radical, our drugs potent; and, recently, we’ve been reminded that we all essentially live in one big pile of kindling that’s oh by the way right along the San Andreas Fault.

rock the boat is to threaten the art world’s prized equilibrium, so little-by-little all movements of any kind are discouraged, until the boat stops moving altogether and things become inert.

LA’s art is no different, at least historically. In the ’70s— amid Nixon, Vietnam, assassinations, moon landings and riots—Chris Burden had himself shot and crucified (Shoot, 1971; Trans-Fixed, 1974), Barbara T. Smith had sex with three men in one performance (Feed Me, 1973), Pippa Garner flipped a Chevy’s chassis and drove it backwards across the Golden Gate Bridge (Backwards Car, 1974), and Paul McCarthy fucked a bunch of raw hamburger meat with a hotdog up his ass, and videotaped it for everyone to see (Sailor’s Meat (Sailor’s Delight), 1975). At the same time, CalArts, as we know it, opened, and counted among its faculty one artist who burned all his paintings (John Baldessari), one who called twenty minutes of blank film a finished film (Nam June Paik), and another who believed that artists should stop making art altogether (Allan Kaprow). The history of LA art, of course, is far more complex and diverse, but this is the genesis of its popular spirit, one that plumbs the depths of taboo and skewers convention.

That spirit, however, has faded. LA art is staid now. Maybe all art is. And it sort of makes sense, too. Up until very recently the art market has been healthy, even booming. But memories of 2008’s Great Recession linger in the rearview, so despite the upswing, a tendency toward stability, toward the sure thing, is understandable. It’s also unfortunate because the sure thing is categorically anti-risk. It calcifies convention: Institutions get comfortable, galleries follow, and artists end up having to choose between satisfying a mandate to exhibit or not exhibiting at all. To

Take Jeffrey Deitch’s recent “Post Human” show, for example, a reprise of his 1992 show of the same name. One look around and it’s clear that the most challenging, insurgent works in the gallery—let alone the city—were made yearsby artists currently in their 80s, or who are now even dead. I’m thinking of McCarthy’s Garden (1991–2), of course, Charles Ray’s Family Romance (1993), and Cady Noland’s Rotten Cop (1988), but there are others. Even some of the more striking contemporary work—like Josh Kline’s Aspirational Foreclosure (Matthew / Mortgage Loan Officer) (2016) and Ivana Bašić’s I will lull and rock my ailing light in my marble arms #2 (2017)—“shocks” in the same way that American Psycho or Marilyn Manson shocks, which is to say, only to viewers still living in the 1990s, who haven’t discovered the internet yet. In other words, the best new works here are old hat… pastiche, even.

Charles Ray, Family Romance, 1993. Photo: Joshua White / JW Pictures. Collection of Jeffrey Deitch. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles.

And that’s the good stuff! Most art shows in LA are about as avant-garde as a corporate happy hour, except without the funny business from Kyle in accounting. Our schools, too, are factories of modest work—CalArts and UCLA, yes, you—training artists to avoid risk, or at least render it invisible, by using concepts like opacity, camouflage and misdirection. At one point, these approaches were an effective counter to the art world’s commodification of difference. The many social justice movements of the 2010s spawned a market that valued marginality so long as it was legible in the work. That is, artists were encouraged to prove it—their identity, their culture, their trauma—and to be explicit enough about it for it to sell, which quickened a roundabout march toward reduction and stereotype. An opaque approach

Chris Burden, Shoot, 1971 at F Space in Los Angeles.

then, in theory, protected the artist’s subjectivity from the capital forces seeking to exploit it. However, it has evolved. More recently, opacity has been used as a tool to avoid rocking the proverbial boat, regardless of identity: Say what you want to say, but make it illegible, and position it juuuuust right. At least, artists can then maintain some degree of integrity without sacrificing career advancement. However useful, these strategies aren’t pioneering or revolutionary: David Hammons, for one, made an entire career out of them, starting in the ‘70s.

Nevertheless, François Ghebaly gave us “Scupper” this September. If there were ever a group show that captured the preferred mood and approach of LA’s MFA high command, this would be it. Apart from some notable names, many of the artists were recent grads, and almost everything was so opaque that the gallery had to provide a paragraph-long explanation for each work in the exhibition packet. For the uninitiated, this is extremely rare, even for conceptual art. A good rule of thumb is more precision, less text, and here we had ten pages. It proved necessary, though, as the artists gave us very little agency as viewers, scant clues with which to decode the work. A slab of grain here, some discarded concrete there, a few street bollards in the corner—that was pretty much it.

The problem wasn’t merely that the art lacked an aesthetic punch or a clever turn of material, and it wasn’t that it required texts to complete its meaning. (This is the name of the game in conceptual art, for better or worse, and has been for some time.) No, the problem in “Scupper” was

a new one, one born out of a careerist climate specific to now, and out of the tepid approach to artmaking it engenders. Here, the issue was that the texts themselves were the opaque artwork, totally separate from the work in the gallery. These texts were carefully crafted and chock-full of criticality, sure, but really amounted to little more than fail-proof language games that traded in an erudite brand of nihilistic doomcore, so masterfully idle that they too should’ve had supplemental texts.

Ask around and you’ll get all sorts of excuses: Things are precarious, many will say, No one wants to lose an opportunity. They’ll point out that audiences want to be soothed, that “challenge” is a thing of the past. Some will blame a culture of fear around voicing dissent, driven by the pettish mores of galleries and the people that run them. Others will point out that risk-taking is rare—after all, it’s risky—so we can’t expect much of it, and still others will argue that risks are being taken, that for some artists even existing is a risk (seriously, this has been said!). Professionalism, millennials and the algorithm are reasonable scapegoats, too, and of course it wouldn’t be the art world if the granddaddy of them all—capitalism—weren’t subject to some blame, ditto with the patriarchy and white supremacy.

It all boils down to anxious artists overtrained to overthink. Timely, relevant moves simply do not happen. As a result, an art world that was once ahead of culture and leading it, now lags far, far behind.

… And yet there’s hope!

“Ha Ha Place” at Leroy’s, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy ofLeroy’s.

Recently, small pockets of experimentation have taken root in LA. Many of them, it’s worth noting, are alternative spaces with much lower overhead than their commercial counterparts (but not all). For example, Public Notice, a gallery no larger than a few closets, beneath a house in Silver Lake, mounted a spate of anti-precious shows last year that added some attitude to a very buttoned up scene; Leroy’s (in addition to being somewhat of an architectural risk) continues to throw shows at the wall to see what sticks, and a lot of them do; Tiffany’s and Quarters, two similarly small spaces operating more sporadically, often eschew the over-considered in favor of unbridled instinct and pathos. Sometimes, it’s enough to simply let art happen as SALA did this past summer in a rundown house at the top of a hill in Mount Washington, or as Emily Lucid did in her anarchically curated “EDEN” show at LAST Projects in December, or as Nora Berman does almost daily on her SparklyMiracleZONE Twitch stream. Even revivals of work by artists like Ron Athey at Murmurs and the many at Deitch’s “Post Human” serve to spark the notion of risk’s possibility.

In every case mentioned above, the approach to exhibition-making more closely resembles a game of tennis than it does a chess match. In a system like this, things are faster and looser, and more uncontained. You set your feet as best you can, you take a swing, you play with pace. The ball might not go where you want—it might not even make it over the net—but good news: It’s coming right back at you, right now, so get ready. There’s slippage, mistakes are made, nothing is perfect, yet things keep moving. Momentum takes hold. And that’s the point.

Now, the tennis approach isn’t risky in itself. But, if we’re to recognize reputational and capital concerns as two fundamental deterrents of risk-taking, then working smaller and with more frequency necessarily dissolves the gravity of each individual exhibit. Then, artists can test the waters, update ideas at low cost, and, frankly, be unprofessional. The perception of things matters less, so there’s no need to hide, no need to overframe, no need to be precious.

It’ll all sing with energy when you care just a little bit less, when you’re forced to go off-script and react, when you do it yourself, and fast. That’s when ideas will rally and come alive, and when we’ll get the unexpected.

“EDEN” at LAST Projects, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy of LAST Projects.

FASHION ATFRIEZE

PHOTOS BYARTILLERYSTAFF

This past fall, I saw over twenty PST ART exhibitions offering contrasting visions of how “art’ and “science” might collide or collaborate. The shows addressed topics from surveillance to biotech to space exploration with dives into artificial intelligence, Indigenous textile-based technologies of the early modern era, and reflections on the environmental precarity of Los Angeles. There were as many variations on the interpretation of “art and science” as there were exhibitions.

BY ANURADHA VIKRAM

COLLISION ENSURES REACTION GETTY PST ART & SCIENCE COLLIDE

From my perspective as a curator of one PST ART exhibition at UCLA Art | Sci Center, and an advisor and contributor to others, both a curious public and knowledgeable researchers are crucial to successful art and science collaboration. Concern about a lack of public investment in science prompted Getty to propose the topic in response to the first Trump administration’s hostility toward scientists and expertise in general. The hope was to educate a wider public about the value of science in the face of the climate crisis, including the wildfires in 2018 and 2020, and the global pandemic, which started only weeks after PST research awards were announced.

and LACMA touting the astonishing “newness” of the “collision” that Getty had orchestrated. And collide we did, with the debris of Cai GuoQiang’s capitalist hysteria at USC Coliseum in September, which both prefigured the doom that has enfolded Los Angeles at the start of 2025 and seemed to mock it. Many of the artists and curators who were in attendance agreed that the event was a misstep that privileged donors’ amusement while terrorizing the very people whose labor and intellect had gone into realizing the PST initiative. The Getty was compelled to issue an apology.

The objects on view took on nearly every form imaginable. At REDCAT, visitors could get a digitized reading of their coffee grounds in One Who Looks at the Cup / Բաժակ

Research plans had to be radically adapted and were often delayed in order to accommodate over a year of travel restrictions and archive. Around the time that exhibition grants were awarded in 2023, the messaging took a different tone, less academic and airier. Promos produced by Getty PR consultants featured museum directors at the Hammer

by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian with Dahlia Elsayed and Andrew Demirjian. An immersive installation in the form of a kitchen patterned on Armenian embroideries housed the central, AI-powered oracle into which coffee cups were placed, which prompted printed out readings. At LACMA, Mesoamerican cosmological models were interpreted spatially through pre-Colombian objects from the museum’s collection, including a pair of ceramic Censer Stands with Solar Deities from Palenque, Chiapas, c. 650–850 CE and a selection of Indigenous flutes and ear trumpets all between 500–1500 years old. This edition of PST ART relied heavily on the Greek definition of techne (which encompasses craft and material science) to support a definition of science that included such pre-industrial methodologies as weaving, dyeing and ceramic firing.

The exhibitions that encapsulated art and science most successfully were the ones that combined audience engagement in the form of participatory actions and workshops, and academic conversations that brought innovative scientific research into conversation with artists. The shows that were the most interesting to look at had immersive, visually stimulating artworks and said something meaningful about our human relationship to other species, to the materials of our planet and solar system, and to the pursuit of ideas. Exhibitions at the Fowler, the Autry, and LACMA all took this approach to promote Indigenous and Latin American cultural inclusion in their projects. At the Armory, artists were invited to contribute works that treat seeds as a form

Cai Guo-Qiang, WE ARE: Explosion Event for PST ART , 2024. Photo by Kenryou Gu.

of future archaeology. Citizen science is another model that dovetails with these expanded approaches, embodied in one of PST ART’s most historically significant shows, which was a posthumous retrospective of artist and UC Irvine professor Beatriz da Costa organized by LACE and hosted at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.

Some of the most compelling moments of this season’s PST ART were the cross-disciplinary symposiums at UC Irvine, UC Riverside, ICA LA, and UCLA that brought artists and scientists into direct dialogue. Academic discourse is valuable for its informed approach to transformative collective imagining, and these symposiums addressed some ideas that couldn’t be practically realized in formal art environments. Experiments as form, particularly those involving live specimens, starved in airless and moisture-free museum environments. “Emergence,” Fathomers’ exhibition on biological art at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center included organically derived art and design projects under the category of “SynBio” that appeared more theoretically potent than invested with life potential.

watershed with an explicitly racist name spoke volumes with minimal interpretation when presented in the CSU Dominguez Hills exhibition “Brackish Water.” Metabolic Studio exhibited earth excavated from underneath the Los Angeles River at Honor Fraser. Conceptual moments in scientific visualization can sometimes be viewed through the same lens as contemporary art. At Brand Library, Jet Propulsion Labs exhibited a symbolic impression called an “Astroglyph” that researchers had placed to mark different research sites on Earth. These imprints into soil and other terrestrial materials are temporary interventions, documented and catalogued as a conceptual archive long after the marks have faded or dispersed.

At ICA LA, El Palomar brought early psychoanalysis, sublimated desire and the psychopharmacological critiques of Paul B. Preciado to life, and King Cobra and Xandra Ibarra both engaged the relationship between raced and sexed bodies and the social apparatus in provocative ways. At the Beall Center at UC Irvine, Chico MacMurtrie’s inflatable robots wheezed and struggled in a Sisyphean performance of artificial life, and Cesar & Lois proposed a biological-digital network synthesizing biofeedback from living plants and

microbes with digital information flows. Hege Tapio’s thought experiment EPHEMERAL suggested that artificial intelligence could be deployed to synthesize human emotions using neuropeptides, effectively introducing a whole new way for corporations to influence and control us through commoditized feelings. The implications of such projects are vast and compelling, and sometimes deeply frightening, an aspect of scientific inquiry that PST ART shows rarely explored.

It did not always matter whether what was on view was artistic output or data visualization. A map created by the Los Angeles County Flood Control District in 1930 for a

At the start of the initiative, Getty asked participating curators, “What is the benefit of art and science collaboration for scientists?” It is telling that an arts institution would not ask a similar question about the benefit of collaboration for artists, but the question is fruitful. At best, art and science can bring out dimensions of one another that the conventions of either discipline otherwise inhibit. Art and science are a conversation, not a collision. Scientists work with budgets that most artists can scarcely dream of, fueled by assurance of their discipline’s centrality to the values of both knowledge and commerce. Artists also trade in both knowledge and commerce, and we can learn from the higher expectations of scientists while also acknowledging the moral compromises that frequently accompany larger funding sums.

Scientists are specialized and trained, with hard won expertise that is not readily translated to the lay public. Artists are adepts at visual communication who can synthesize complex ideas in a manner that becomes digestible for a broader audience. Scientists have a communication problem, too much information and too little connection. Artists are communication and connection experts. The PST ART exhibitions that were able to spark a meaningful collaboration were often the ones that presented fewer objects and more media, live performance, and scientific experiments as non-traditional formats for art. Here, art and science collaborations expand our imaginations by introducing possibilities that are fantastical but also deeply, fundamentally real.

Lauren Bon “Concrete is Fluid,” exhibition view, 2024. Courtesy of Honor Fraser. El Palomar, Schreber is a Woman (film still), 2020.4K video transferred to HD, 2-channel synchronized projection, color, stereo, 30 minutes. © El Palomar, image courtesy the artists.

DOUG AITKEN

Two takes on Doug Aitken’s Lightscape at the Marciano Art Foundation and “Psychic Debris Field” at

Recommended

Regen Projects

for Amnesiacs PAT WILLIAMS

A uniformed employee in blue walks through the mechanized depths of an Amazon fulfillment center. Now we see a second figure—not a human but a robot arm that prepares packages of unknown Amazon goods. Then, intriguingly, these coworkers synchronize: the man begins to pop and lock in harmony with the movement of the machine. It becomes a twin dance, repeated in a variety of ways across several large screens.

If this whole narrative were somehow all captured in a single still photograph that would be impressive; if this were a music video then the music would be better, or maybe worse—but either way more memorable; if this were a feature film it would have a story so we’d expect something before, after or in front of this dance, to give it another layer of interest. Is this a moment of liberation from banal labor? Capitulation to it? Emerging empathy for the robot? A slapstick aside?

But this is Lightscape, a multi-screen art-film nearly an hour long, and the vignette only occurs for a few minutes before transitioning into footage of other things. As in so much film and video work in this well-established mode, finding meaning here requires bringing some from home.

They say all comparisons are odious and I’m inclined to suspect Doug Aitken would agree, for he belongs to that class of big-budget symbol-slinging post-conceptualists whose work only seems remarkable if you’ve forgotten that everything else in the world exists. The Los Angeles Times called Aitken’s most recent offering, “Fall’s biggest spectacle”—apparently forgetting Cai Guo-Qiang’s epic fireworks display at the Coliseum, Freddie Freeman’s World Series grand slam, and the 2024 US presidential election. Artists like Aitken thrive in an in-between space of inter-contextual amnesia: on paper, the work is more exotic than works by poorer artists (most of them), but not nearly as exotic as the spectacles provided by reality on a daily basis.

While Lightscape is undeniably big and expensive, it’s not IMAX, the Las Vegas Sphere,

DUELLING REVIEWS

Fragmented Images for a Fragmented World ARTILLERY STAFF

Doug Aitken, a multimedia artist known for creating immersive environments that combine sculpture, video, and sound—has a new large-scale project at the Marciano Art Foundation, plus an accompanying sister show at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Lightscape (2024), the artist’s 55-minute non-narrative video loop, offers a multi-screen panoramic (though the circle is not fully enclosed) cinematic event housed in the foundation’s cavernous first floor gallery. As the name suggests, Lightscape is an art film / fragmented visual landscape made of splintered images and videos (often kaleidoscopic) with corresponding sound. The film breaks apart any attempt at identifiable story line or structure through the use of multiple timelines, perspectives and characters.

The first impression, entering the theater, is of things in motion: a cross-section of people dancing, machines dancing, hands dancing, people singing, counterposed against a lonesome Western landscape traversed by a lone man on horseback. Interwoven among these images is footage of buildings, bustling highways, dilapidated airplanes, Semi trucks at gas stations—a gray-haired woman presumably at her mid-century modern home—and spoken fragments of short sentences. The installation offers a composite view of people, urbanism, industry and desert landscapes that pretty accurately depicts life in Southern California.

Lightscape’s fractal geometric visuals and auditory overlay— colorful, ambitious, and energetic—do an excellent job of immersing the viewer in a sort of deconstructed cinematic cubist world of bits which have been combined into a meaningful whole. Part love story, part lonesome journey, part lifecycle hyperlapse, the video feels like a frenetic homage to memories, dreams, and life in Southern California. A contemporary

4DX or virtual reality—but it is bigger and louder than any painting. The LA Philharmonic’s involvement in the initial version of the piece might seem very progressive compared to what an orchestra usually does, until you realize that it sounds kind of like Enya.

What exactly will you see in Lightscape? A series of stylishly mysterious images and portentous scenes that look like a very long trailer for a late-period David Lynch movie, with the grotesquerie and humor replaced with short moments of modern dance and snatches of bad poetry. Someone says “One day we’ll slip away” over and over again while staring at an oil pump.

There are ideas here—about Los Angeles, about the myth of the American West, about the plenitude of human experience, and about the hack-artist-subjects-du-jour, landscape and memory—but like a bad SNL sketch, Aitken forces each idea to take up far more time and space than it is worth. Indeed, Lightscape cannot be contained to only a Disney Concert Hall live-music-accompanied premiere and a three-month stint in a room at the Marciano Art Foundation; apparently, storyboards of its least interesting scenes needed to be turned into multimedia art and shown at Regen Projects. Even great directors’ storyboard paintings are, at best, interesting-if-you-like-the-film and these are worse—a mixture of digital printing and sewn material, they display unstylish rearrangements of sky, modernist home and swimming pool. Their most obvious function is as an overgrown souvenir of having seen the movie.

The same corporate ethic and mantelpiece aesthetic animates the other work in Aitken’s Regen Projects show. It consists mostly of sculptures of animals that are about as surreal as every other contemporary art sculpture of an animal made since 1980, and so style-free that they might amount to nothing more than digitally enlarged versions of toy railroad scenery. One dearly hopes that nobody that likes sculpture or animals (whether Aitken or one of his assistants) actually modeled the creatures or poses—if this is the best that they could do it would be truly heartbreaking.

The only surprises on display here are three buffalo, colored and textured like cottage cheese that somehow manage to be not funny. The animals are about the size of furniture but are not so large that they take on new visual properties associated with architectural scale, because then Aitken wouldn’t be able to sell them, but they are large enough that they don’t immediately remind you of the tourist knickknacks they resemble. However, Aitken lacks Jeff Koons’ post-Pop desire to rub how little work he did, and how little taste the audience has, into the viewer’s face. Here, one senses that the listlessness is neither tragic commentary nor deadpan joke but rather that Aitken sees his work to be an experiential distraction from the seamless delivery of his ideas: Form does not create meaning but merely injects it. These are snow globes for people with very large living rooms.

What Aitken’s multimedia presentation communicates is not versatility but a profound sense of inattention, as if all these constructions in film, foam and flickering light are props and ephemera left by the practice of some other kind of person—a pop star, an ad executive—who directs brigades of indifferent craftspeople to bring his mood board to life. Aitken has an eye for loaded and arresting images; he also has an eye for blandly slick ones—he lacks a third eye with the wisdom to know the difference. Or perhaps he has it but keeps it willfully closed, since the moneyed classes that buy and fund these diffuse extravagances are apparently content to repeatedly inflict environments as characterless as what he makes onto the landscape he makes it about.

Left: Installation view of Doug Aitken, “Psychic Debris Field.” Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

Doug Aitken, Lightscape, 2024. © Doug Aitken Workshop.

surrealist digital altar to the new and old American West.

Fans of Aitken’s work will recognize Lightscape as an expansion on the artist’s established oeuvre. The film draws on several themes and images from Aitken’s previous video installations including House (2010), which features his parents, NEW ERA (2022), in which a video played in a hexagonal mirrored room creates a fragmented kaleidoscope effect with images of planes, bison, urban landscapes, machines and people in motion; and HOWL (2023).

As I watched the movie, I kept trying to understand what vantage point Aitken wanted me to view it from. The obvious answer was from the benches in the center of the space—but I didn’t start there. I wanted to get closer, to immerse myself further. So I approached each screen, standing about 10 feet away so that the screen plane encompassed my peripheral vision. I wanted to feel invited inside this Rothkoesque film landscape. But, of course, it’s not meant to be so intimate. The image compositions are centered too far up to seem as if you are invited to stand next to them because if you do, you are then viewing it from dirt level—eye to eye with a horse’s hooves.

So I scrambled up the wooden block benches which have been placed in the center of the room and watched an orchestrated Southern California-meetsAmerican West fantasy where the line between fiction versus nonfiction and hyper-slick versus old west is purposefully blurred and intentionally left unanswered, just like the most memorable dreams.

At Regen Projects, an exhibition of sculptures and paintings expands on these themes. “Psychic Debris Field” couples life-sized (or greater-than-life-sized) resin sculptures of elk, stags, and mountain lions with depictions of placid swimming pools in desert landscapes. In the front rooms of the gallery, a mirrored acrylic Vortex (2024) wall work reflects back a topsy-turvy world, alluding to desert mirages and psychedelia or perhaps a more sinister kind of confusion. White resin buffalo draped in greenery serve as makeshift memorials. Along the wall, paintings / assemblages sewn from different kinds of fabric deliver makeshift impressions of modernist homes and pools in the desert… it could be Joshua Tree—influencers silhouetted against the orange rocks.

In the gallery’s back chambers, a series of multimedia sculptures—stags with interlocking antlers; desert birds in fake cacti grown out of old tires, a bus stop and an ice machine—link in a soundscape and by a program of colorful lighting effects. There’s a bit of Burning Man or Red Rocks here, but tuned in and punched up, lent a feeling of pathos rather than exuberance. Nearby, a series of backlit transparent photographs of desert waystations line a hallway.

Collectively, Lightscape and “Psychic Debris Field” offer me a thought provoking encounter where we are asked to explore the disjointed realities of an ever industrialization of Southern California while mourning the myths and natural wonder of the disappearing American West.

Installation view of Lightscape by Doug Aitken at Marciano Art Foundation. Photo: Brica Wilcox. Courtesy of Marciano Art Foundation.

TAKEOVERARTIST

JON PYLYPCHUK

@RUDYBUST

“I'D WALK ACROSS THE FREEWAY FOR THAT MAN.” -DIVACORP

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

REFRAMING DIORAMAS

RUBY ZARSKY

ORDINARY PEOPLE

REVIEWS

PIPPA GARNER

FAYE DRISCOLL

ANGELYNE PAUL THEK

William Kentridge

“The Great Yes, The Great No,” 2025, at The Wallis. Courtesy of The Wallis.

The Wallis

In his monumental displays of structure, history, movement and sound—operatic compositions that unabashedly aspire to the now-“traditional” status of Gesamtkunstwerk, William Kentridge has become a leading voice not only in contemporary art but in the world’s cultural and social discourse. At this point, after decades of engagement with the immoralities of apartheid in his native South Africa, Kentridge doesn’t so much speak on behalf of his Black countrymen—a necessarily awkward advocacy—as speak about and, in works like “The Great Yes, The Great No,” around the legacy left to a country like South Africa by a fraught modern history.

The quasi-opera concerns itself with a moment where Europe’s artists and intellectuals, having exoticized their subjugated African counterparts, had reason (need, really) to move closer to the civilization that so infatuated them. In this instance, that civilization was found not in Africa, but from Africa, in the Caribbean. In 1941, André Breton fled France’s Vichy regime by sailing to Martinique, where his Surrealist movement was already providing a theoretical basis for anti-colonialist sentiment. Also on board were Aimé Césaire and his wife Suzanne, African citizens of France who were crucially involved in the Surrealist/Black nationalist movement négritude (which would later play a role in the liberations of France’s sub-Saharan colonies).

Such an admixture of politics, aesthetics, history and drama appeals deeply to Kentridge, who allows himself some factual liberty to drive home his modernist fantasy (such as placing Cuban Surrealist painter Wifredo Lam and post-colonialist theorist Frantz Fanon aboard ship). The whole incident becomes bigger than itself in Kentridge’s hands, a pretense that might irk some scholars but which in fact marks the multimedia production not as an historical pageant but as an (art-)historical vision.

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE 45

The chorus-like staging, replete with masks, moves and stage meanders, does maintain a pageant quality. The music is choral, accompanied by a four-instrument band. From their appearance, accents, and choreographies (individual and group), the actor-singers are apparently South African. For Kentridge these are not performers engaged in exotic ritual, but his neighbors and sometimes fellow strugglers.

Aimé Césaire, Wifredo Lam—genuine Surrealists outside Europe—are figures from recent history who clearly inspire the artist’s awe. As he unapologetically demonstrated in his retrospective at the Broad last year, Kentridge is a Modernist fanboy par excellence.

The set for “The Great Yes, The Great No,” mostly chairs and benches downstage, is backed by an expansive diagrammatic rendition of a ship’s deck, actually taken from that of a South African ferry (if I understood correctly), above which pinwheel myriad different images and, often, slogans appearing in response to dialog on stage. The chorus-like ensemble moves fluidly before this droll firmament; their fractured processionals, along with the maze-like backdrop, recall the manically bisected performance spaces of another neo-Modernist impresario, the late Richard Foreman. Foreman was himself more of a Surrealist than Kentridge, but their passions are shared, as they also embrace Bauhaus theater and dance, stage-work of the Russian Avant Garde, Dada provocation, and of course the manifold pretenses of opera, grand and especially chamber. William Kentridge has many boxes and thinks outside all of them.

—Peter Frank

Installation views of “Reframing Dioramas: The Art of Preserving

Courtesy of

Photographs by Elon Schoenholz.

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles REFRAMING DIORAMASPART OF PST ART: ART & SCIENCE COLLIDE

This beautiful show grapples with the history and purpose of habitat dioramas—those eerily lifelike tableaus found in darkened museum halls—and, by extension, questions the past and present life of natural history museums. What is the role of a natural history museum in 2025, and what do 20th century dioramas mean in a 21st century context? Because the exhibition involves institutional self-critique, a few contradictions crop up within its extended inquiry. However, these inconsistencies spur rather than dissuade viewers to think even more fully about “reframing” the mission of natural history museums for our complicated era.

Viewers without a natural history background or an experience of elementary school field trips might wonder what a habitat diorama is, exactly? A display text lists their three key features: 1. “a realistic background painted on a curved surface,” 2. “a foreground made with real or modeled plants and rocks,” and 3. “taxidermized animals.” But that bare bones description doesn’t capture the haunting qualities of classic dioramas in any natural history museum.

Dioramas first rose to popularity in the 1920s. They were seen as a more dynamic alternative to the traditional glass cases crammed full of very dead-looking specimens or their skeletons. Dioramas were also an attempt to capture the support of the public for saving living animals and their environments in a time of unregulated hunting and habitat destruction during the early 20th century, when many species (including passenger pidgeons, great awks, grizzly bear, bison and mule deer, among others) were hunted to near or total extinction. In Los Angeles’ version of a diorama hall, as you approach each glass-fronted diorama, it floats into visibility out of semi-darkness. It’s hard not to be transfixed by the unblinking stares of taxidermied jackals, armadillos and monkeys.

At first, quickly surveying the room, you’d be hard pressed to find much that’s different in this exhibit from a hundred years ago when the first diorama hall opened at LA’s Natural History Museum. This indicates how well integrated newer elements (film, text, projections, still photography, audio and digital interventions) added for this show are within the context of the historical dioramas. These contemporary additions include three new dioramas commissioned for this show with film, projection and other new media elements. The most arresting of these is an eye-popping piece by artists Yesenia Prieto, Joel Fernando, and Jason Chang (RFX1) which looks a bit like a still from some neon tinted anime

film, populated by alebrije, brightly colored, sometimes hybrid, sometimes mythical creatures, cast here as protectors of and advocates for the natural world in all its dazzling splendor.

These new media additions help dissect the history, ethics and initial aims of specimen collection and exhibition. Bilingual text panels (English/Spanish) discuss former hunting practices that the museum no longer relies on to obtain specimens, as well as the many uncredited (and possibly unpaid) people who contributed to the dioramas’ making, also pointing out the part colonialism played in specimen acquisition.

A few contradictions leak in via the text panels. One panel tells us, “Before dioramas, museums traditionally displayed specimens in taxonomic order... Birds, mammals, insects and plants would all be packed into rows in separate cases. Dioramas gave these specimens life by putting them back together into their natural habitats.” (Italics mine).

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve adored natural history museums since I was a kid. I love this museum and show. But am I the only one whose fur feels rubbed the wrong way when dead, stuffed animals are described as being given life by any mode of displaying them? Also, a tad strange are the quotes asserting that dioramas are meant to show animals in “their natural habitat.” How does a glass case with an idealized painted background housing taxidermied animals and dead or fake plants constitute “a natural habitat?” A later text panel says something far more accurate, though, again, a bit at odds with previous display texts, declaring, “The static presentation of nature is the most artificial.” Still another panel states, “Dioramas are not exact copies of nature... creators selected and changed natural features to balance composition and interest,” again belying the notion that they are “natural habitats.”

Despite these small quibbles about semantics or textual discrepancies, this is a thoughtful, laudable show. In our era of climate change and ecological threat, natural history museums could potentially be an illuminating positive influence. This show, as well as being a piece of science history, represents a good faith effort to begin thinking about what those new roles for such museums could look like.

—Amy Gerstler

Ruby Zarsky, Cosmic Consciousness , 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Ceradon Gallery.

Ceradon Gallery RUBY ZARSKY

Goddesses once etched into stone tablets and later deified in oil paintings now live another immortal existence: nude or scantily clad, wet and voluptuous, digitally rendered and plastered across Reddit or X, they resemble magical beasts or aliens. Some have had their hip and breast size transformed to impossible proportions while others have otherworldly skin and hair colors. In some cases, these goddesses possess multiple sets of genitals or pairs of dimorphic sexual organs—a gesture that humans have been exploring since an unknown sculptor created the Sleeping Hermaphrodite in Imperial Rome. The glow of the screen is new but the subject matter is not—portraits like these have been with us since the dawn of culture. I bring this up because with the current political hysteria about transgender rights flooding public discourse, it’s helpful to remember that humans have been horny freaks since time immemorial. To me, this suggests that our horniness and desire to emulate and even pleasure ourselves to the bodies we imagine is both healthy and natural.

“RULE 34,” the debut solo exhibition of New York artist and former member of Sateen Ruby Zarsky at Ceradon Gallery, is a meditation on the serene pleasures such images can grant their viewers. The more than 30 works included in the show are replete with images of nude, possibly hermaphroditic women. Obscene by design and inflected with homages to popular anime and video-game characters, “RULE 34” abounds with girthy uncut penises and voluptuous breasts on unblemished, athletic goddesses.

In Cosmic Consciousness (2024), a be-dicked woman resembling Chun-Li Xiang, a character from the 1991 video game Street Fighter II, holds herself up from a seated position, spreading her legs to display a penis that is larger and longer than her foot. While it may be tempting to dismiss the painting as pornographic or fetishistic, such thinking ignores Zarsky’s subtle choices—especially the choice to use Chun-Li, the first playable female character in the Street Fighter series, as a subject—to produce the image.

Among the other works, Fierce Diva (2024) and Glorious Queen (2024), a pair of paintings that feature scan-like renderings of early transvestigations that feature transsexual women fooling johns and making careers as athletes and celebrities, stand out as illustrative examples of Zarsky’s historical eye. Meanwhile, the impeccably titled To Kill a Chimera You Must Use Lead From Above (2024) seems to be the skeleton key that unlocks the entire exhibition, with the hung, latex-wearing dominatrix at its center fingering another t-girl and placing her hands around the circular, schematized grid that erupts from her ass.

Tucked within these references to recent digital and trans history is an implicit send-up of the places where queer people, and transwomen in particular, sourced their identities while seeking refuge from the imprisoning mythologies of cisgender heterosexuality. Artists like Zarsky, who embrace and honor the obscene, are able to accomplish a form of radical honesty and trust in their desires that many will never experience. In the most liberating sense possible, “RULE 34” lacks cowardice. The show is as political as it is pleasurable.

—Wyatt Coday

Installation view of “Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968,” November 23, 2024–May 4, 2025 at MOCA Grand Avenue. Courtesy of The

Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).

Photo by Jeff McLane.

ORDINARYPEOPLE

MOCA

MOCA’s “Ordinary People” manages to tell a story about photorealism that is eclectic, diverse, condescending and drab.

Homage to the People of the Bronx: Double Dutch at Kelly StreetLa Freeda, Jevette, Towana, Staice (1981–1982) by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres’ might be a thesis statement for the entire show: the pair take plaster life-casts of real children—theoretically the most realistic and specific technique possible—and render them as flat, kitschy, generalized and ignorable as a get-your-kid-vaccinated PSA due to the limits of the technology (the supposedly jump-roping kids’ stiff poses are clearly the result of them being cast while squished against a wall or floor) and the pair’s hamfisted painting technique (giving the figures goggle-eyes and textureless clothing). It might be mistaken for a comment on something if the intent weren’t so obviously wholesome and celebratory. The presentation doesn’t help: once upon a time Ahearn and Torres’ sculptures of their neighbors—mounted outside on buildings in the Bronx—were capable of delighting and sometimes scaring residents, but isolated in a museum, they might as well be invisible.

“Ordinary People” does everything possible to make attempts at realism—once the primary playground for art’s most competitive geniuses—seem prosaic and uninspired.

In the words of MOCA’s own introductory wall text:

Ordinary People contends that the popular appeal of photorealism is not based in dazzling, virtuosic technique, but rather in its work ethic. It reframes photorealism as a teachable, learnable skill, akin to sign painting, commercial illustration, billboard painting, and tattoo artistry. Citing photorealism’s emphasis on labor, the exhibition proposes that photorealism is widely appreciated because it demystifies the creative process and celebrates hard work.

It is good that no one reads these things, since rarely has a paragraph of would-be-inclusive institutional boilerplate managed to insult so many different kinds of people so quickly. It reads as if it was written by someone who has never met an illustrator, gotten a tattoo, or seen a fascinated neighborhood crowd around a muralist’s ladder—and the entire exhibition appears to have been curated while wearing the same blinders. The museum has assembled a show defining Photorealism as humble depictions of humble subjects simply by leaving out the dazzling depictions and dazzling subjects.

There is something deeply conservative and almost literally, historically Puritan in MOCA exiling both uncommon talents and uncommon imagery to the same decadent Hell, feeding directly into a false and MAGAlike duality which defines the diverse and sociallyaware coalition that likes art and didn’t vote for Donald Trump as standing in noble, ascetic opposition to all the fun America could be having without them. The show makes an appeal to a mythical populace that insists on looking at a version of itself shorn of specificity, intrigue, humor, sensuality or any of the other qualities that characterize successful popular entertainment. This reductive theory of Photorealism’s value also requires severing its obvious links to artists well within the critical mainstream’s elite canon,

with blue-chip heavy-hitters like James Rosenquist, Gerhard Richter and the team of Fischli and Weiss nowhere to be found.

While from the beginning there have undeniably been advocates of Photorealism who escaped the critical stigma of being mere traditionalists by emphasizing their use of mechanical tools like tracing, grids and projectors, that was never the part of the movement that impressed the greater public. If the common folk loved to look at work for its own sake they’d be lining up around the block to see the dry iterations of Agnes Martin or On Kawara.

While Andrea Bowers’ exquisite colored-pencil drawing People Before Profits (2012)—depicting a protester holding a sign saying just that—is as deliciously skilled as its activist subject is relevant, in the larger context of the show one can’t help thinking the curators were ok with including this masterpiece of color, detail, and observation merely because it was very small. A viewer familiar with the history of Photorealism will wonder if Franz Gertsch’s similarly stylish and precise paintings of the gender-bending Luciano Castelli were left out because they were too big, too masterful, too flamboyant or too much all three? Likewise, crowdpleaser Chuck Close only appears here via one of his least-painterly greyscale experiments, complete with the gridded photo from which it was derived.

If the current risk-averse mood demanded fellow genre-defining show-offs like Hilo Chen and John Kacere be left out because they were men depicting sexy women, that still doesn’t explain the exclusion of the deliriously vibrant pinball table, tin toy, and candy machine paintings of Charles Bell? Does the MOCA believe “ordinary people” have no taste for bubblegum pop?

Women are permitted to depict sexuality here, but not in any ecstatic way: Marilyn Minter—an artist undeniably fascinated by the sexualizing glamor of fantastic ad imagery—is represented by some of her most staid and minimal canvases. The utterly essential Joan Semmel—who pioneered an unmistakably female take on intimacy in the 1970s—is only here as a typical painter of anonymous nudes, with all her existential and psychedelic edges sanded off.

On the other end of the ledger, if the MOCA is truly attempting to posit photorealism as a salt-of-the-earth universal art form then it missed a trick by not using its curatorial heft to spotlight and elevate any of the gifted and unrecognized photoreal artists who make their living by way of “sign painting, commercial illustration, billboard painting, and tattoo artistry” and spend their uncompensated free time working on pictures of their dead relatives and Kobe Bryant. While the curators claim the know-how on display is “teachable” and “learnable” it is apparently only representable by artists who arrive with a commercial gallery’s seal of approval. One cannot credibly tell a story about the relationship of fine art to ordinary people while still policing the high-art/low-art boundary.

“Ordinary People”’s wishful thesis is so shaky that its internal contradictions reveal themselves as early as the second room, which Louis Philippe Joseph, Duke of Orleans (2006) lavishly dominates. While it is true that few painters or critics familiar with illusionistic

Continued on page 74

Left: Pippa Garner. Courtesy of Matthew Brown.

Right: Pippa Garner, The Bowels of the Mind , 2021. Inflatables, fabric, rope, plastic cones, vintage fishing nets, metal sign, wooden dowel, oversized lightbulb, lamp fixture, timers. Courtesy of the artist, Matthew Brown and STARS.

STARS  PIPPA  GARNER

The artist died during the run of her exhibition, just a few days before the new year. It is fitting given that Pippa Garner used her body as a sort of extended art project, something she worked on for years—altering it with surgeries, tattoos and piercings. The greatest work of the show may be that which was not on the checklist: She attended her own opening just a few weeks before her death and laid down on a cot dressed as a stuffed animal. Supine in the gallery, her body’s presence in the show is perhaps just as great as its absence from the world.

A quote from last year’s press release references her death, “I just want to make sure my body ends up where it belongs when I die: in the junkyard with the appliances I’ve made fun of throughout my career.” Garner has always had an irreverence towards the body, viewing it as part machine, part product: just another appliance.

In “Misc Pippa” at STARS in Hollywood, the artist’s final exhibition, the body is always present but always on the verge of becoming something else. When entering the gallery one is faced with Kar-mann (1969/2024) Garner’s sculpture whose front is a gold hot rod and back is two human legs: one on the ground, one kicked out to the side, looking as if it will sprint out of the gallery. The two parts seamlessly blend as one, rendered in sleek fiberglass and painted with automotive paint; human balls hang off the back of the car between the legs. It’s something you might see on the road—it’s not uncommon to see plastic gonads dangling from the tailgate of a truck. Garner pushes the anthropomorphizing of machines that already exists in the world even further.

Another work, Un(tit)led (Clitoris Ashtray), features a photograph of an ashtray sculpture where the indentation for an in-progress cigarette is made yonic by a small pink clitoris. An old car headlight adorns the other side of the ashtray, pointing to the smoker. With this strange object—part fetish part utilitarian—Garner pulls out the suggestive innuendo of the everyday. These quotidian objects become unexpectedly sexual through her touch. A couple of lamps in the show feature the same gesture: the chubby bottom half of a kewpie doll is merged with a plastic dildo, a candelabra bulb meant to look like a candle dripping with wax. And in Agitator Lamp, a washing machine agitator is used as the base of a lamp, its wavy lines suggestive of female anatomy. In much of the artist’s work, the body is divided into parts, merging with other objects, never completely whole.

Garner left us with hundreds of plans for sculptures. A series of sketches show designs for works, many left unrealized but detailed so that they might still be produced. Some appear in the gallery, like the Cunnilingus Chair (2024), emerging from its sketched idea: the seat of a chair with eyes and a tongue sticking upwards in order to pleasure the sitter. Many of the works in the show span time periods, and their dates on the checklist are sometimes 50 years apart — from plan to fully realized object. The artist’s imagination lingers in the works yet to be produced.

—Gracie Hadland

Faye Driscoll’s

Photo: Angel Origgi. Courtesy of REDCAT Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater.

FAYE  DRISCOLL

REDCAT

I’ve always said that I have a crush on dance—on the medium itself, its libidinousness, its structural uninhibitedness, the insanity of memorizing your body’s movements on command and then repeating them. As a writer, I cling to permanence on the page, but dance offers none. Weathering, choreographed by Faye Driscoll, and performed at the RedCat Theatre on February 6–8, leans into the artform’s inherent ephemerality: 10 dancers writhe, collapse and spill over one another on a mattress-like raft, forming a shifting, interdependent mass. The audience is seated in the round, while dancers rotate their raft-stage so that viewers are granted a complete view of the scene. The result is that the dancers’ movements feel visually lapsed: we barely catch it when they shift.

I went into the performance knowing it was inspired by climate collapse and catastrophe, but I was interested in how it would feel to see it in Los Angeles—a city mid-crisis, mid-collapse—where the air still carries the residue of wildfire and disaster has become the season we live in. Dance, with its impermanence, feels like the appropriate medium for disaster. Driscoll is known for attuning her performances to place and circumstance—was there always a dancer with a JanSport backpack eerily reminiscent of a go-bag? Do audience members always guffaw this much?

The performance begins as the dancers walk around the central stage in a flurry chanting operatically: Oh Spit, Oh Cum, Oh, Fascia. Outfitted in muted, mixed-climate attire that feels uniquely appropriate to Los Angeles (denim cutoffs, a puffer vest), they carry bags that will eventually spill out in a cacophony of capitalistic detritus: mascara, headphones, wallet, iPhone. Joining each other on the mattress, they enter a state of hyper-presence, with movements so micro-attuned that it feels as if nothing happens for a very long time.

After some time, stagehands emerge, spinning the raft slightly, and over the course of the next hour, the whole show goes pretty wild—clothes are peeled away, spit drips out of mouths onto other bodies, limbs are tangled indistinguishably; there is fruit and flowers and soil, the raft continuously accelerates, and the audience is anointed with an earthy, scented mist. The performance is also accompanied by a combination of live and recorded audio of dense

breathing, humming and yelling. Seated in the front row like a kind of omniscient weatherman, Driscoll susurrates into her microphone, occasionally spinning the raft herself or wiping away sweat from the dancers.

Weathering demands a very generous and reciprocal presence from the viewer. There is something obscene about watching bodies work this hard. The dancers strain and sink into one another, their movements pulling urgency, exhaustion and sudden bursts of life. They move both as a unit and as individuals, attuned to each other in ways that feel both practiced and spontaneous. Their movements make me think about the choreography of effort, of removing debris after a flood or digging through ash after a fire. “Weathering” might also refer to the slow erosion of the body, the long-term effects of crisis that settle in the bones. The performance is described in promotional materials as a “multi-sensory flesh sculpture surging through the Anthropocene,” but it feels less like a sculpture than an ecosystem, an unstable and interdependent structure always threatening to collapse. Many of the poses appear drawn directly from elements of Romantic painting, particularly Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, with bodies draped over one another in precarious arrangements, their limbs reaching outward in gestures of desperation and survival.

We want to believe we can control the weather. We study it, predict it, try to shape the future in its image. But Weathering does something else—it exposes the mechanics of a system we are inside, whether we want to be or not. It hums with a hunger for divinity, for something beyond survival. The bodies press and yield, shaping and reshaping each other in real time. As climate change renders our city a godless inferno, this work feels like a kind of prayer. When I leave, I think about how our bodies are designed to protect us from toxins—how the nose and throat tickle to warn us, how mucus is productive. The body responds before the mind catches up. Weathering offers a commitment to moving through catastrophe together, body to body, breath to breath.

—Hannah Tishkoff

Angelyne, “ICANDY,” installation view, 2025. Courtesy of Melrose Botanical Garden.

Angelyne, Audrey Hepburn. Courtesy of Melrose Botanical Garden.

Angelyne at Reception of “ICANDY” at Melrose Botanical Garden.

Melrose Botanical Garden ANGELYNE

As I fought through crosstown traffic, the messages came in fast and furious.

Hurry up!... Where are you?!... She’s about to arrive!... You’re gonna miss her corvette pull up!

When I finally parked and made it to Melrose Botanical Garden, the crowd was spilling onto the street. Traffic slowed down. Paparazzi snapped pics. Everyone wanted a glimpse of Angelyne, the artist, provocateur and legend who had shot back into public life not with a publicity stunt or a billboard, but with a complicated body of new artwork titled “ICANDY.” Inside the gallery hung portraits of celebrities that Angelyne composed from food scraps, then photographed and finished off with a glittery autograph. Though crafted from leftover beans, noodles, lettuce and olives, these surreal apparitions of bygone stars seem to celebrate as much as skewer our obsession with self-mythology.

Inside the gallery, a coquettish Audrey Hepburn emerges from the leftovers of a juicy red cabbage salad, while coffee grounds sketch Cher’s bouffant of black hair and charcoaled eyes, rendering the pop singer even more darkly enigmatic. Baby corns crown the Statue of Liberty and a roasted red pepper curves into her coy pout. “ICANDY” immortalizes many icons, from Elizabeth Taylor and George Burns to Roseanne Barr, Michael Jackson, and a dozen others. The works are often irreverent and silly, but like Los Angeles itself, they trade in fantasy—their playfulness masking sadness and melancholy. People may come to L.A. to chase their dreams, but many stay to avoid growing up.

Viewing the works during the opening, I could almost hear my mother shouting at me to “not play with your food.” There’s something deliciously punk in the way Angelyne disobeys all our proverbial parents, transforming her L.A. dinners into the stars she dreamed of emulating. Few artists possess a better biography to examine the phenomenon of stardom—its ups and downs—than Angelyne, who for all

her charisma and talent, never quite broke into the upper echelons of showbiz. Long before Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian, Angelyne pioneered the art of celebrity-as-medium. She burst into the popular imagination in the mid 1980s when she plastered photos of herself—Marilyn-esque, with echoes of 1950’s studio starlets and the flesh of 1980’s centerfold bunnies—onto billboards across Los Angeles.

In much the same way that almost everybody today cultivates social media followers, Angelyne encouraged the public to project their own fantasies onto her images. “ICANDY” immortalizes not just the figures she pays homage to, but with her glittery signature, these works write Angelyne—still hustling after all these years—back into that mythos. In short, it’s a very L.A. show: It vibrates with glitz and glamour, but also with a deep longing.

Yet that longing shouldn’t be confused with “ICANDY’s” critique of our collective mania for fame. In a moment when our worship of celebrity grows ever more dizzying—of politicians, actors, influencers, and artists—Angelyne’s portraits remind us that stardom, like the food they’re made from, is perishable.

Back outside, Angelyne charged fans for photographs taken beside her iconic hot pink corvette. In a tight pink dress, pink full-length gloves, a pink veil hiding her face, and her trademark fountain of platinum hair, the artist orchestrated her own spectacle. And who could blame her? Angelyne knows better than almost anyone that in today’s fame-hungry world, the art as much as the artist is the main course.

—Sammy Loren

Paul Thek, “Untitled (rooftops), 1987,” installation view. Courtesy of Hannah Hoffman.

Paul Thek, Untitled (rooftops), 1987. Courtesy of Hannah Hoffman.

Hannah Hoffman PAUL THEK

I ring the buzzer three, maybe four times at 725 N. Western. No one answers. While I debate whether to abandon my mission, a man with a ladder leaves a side gate open and I slip in. Wandering through a courtyard, I find Hannah Hoffman tucked in the back. This is the gallery’s inaugural exhibition at its new space, an addition to the Melrose Hill pile-on. Upon entering, I am greeted by an intimate room; sisal carpeting and dim light from two orbs create a cocooned, if sparse, domestic space. A single humble Paul Thek painting awaits me.

“Untitled (rooftops), 1987” is both the name of the show and its sole painting. Less a performatively empty space than a meditation on one painting, the show is understated but direct. I am immediately somatically at ease. Hung nice and low, and perpetually in shadow, this intimately scaled painting depicts the view of the East Village skyline from Thek’s apartment window. Energetically washy and loose, a moody sky in pepto bismol and blue sits atop a golden-hour cityscape, buildings tightening into short flick-of-thewrist strokes. Despite, or rather in contrast to, the acrylic with which it’s painted, there’s a distinctly old-world European quality to the painting. This East Village could be Paris or Rome.

Paul Thek was a true flaneur, wandering around Europe in the ’60s and ’70s, consorting with the likes of Tennessee Williams and Susan Sontag, picking up odd jobs. Thek was also notably a lapsed Catholic, although perhaps aspirationally devout, in a uniquely tormented gay Catholic way. His work reveals a reverence for and a deep knowledge of spiritual questions in Catholicism, and of its vast well of ephemera, symbology and architecture. In this light, I experience “Untitled (rooftops), 1987” religiously, as if entering a chapel, a devotional effect created by the low lighting and the single painting. There’s a preciousness to the painting because of its isolation; it functions as a sort of shrine. This is not unique to this painting: Thek’s seminal series Technological Reliquaries features beeswax body parts and meat encased in Plexiglas. While he was in Italy, Thek became interested in folk relics and saints’ festivals, which shaped many of his late 1960s sculptures and installations. Thek’s work is by nature eclectic and free, but he always returns to the spiritual.

As a first show, Hannah Hoffman’s Thek exhibition bravely asserts an understated stillness. I can’t imagine this show will bring in crowds—even if they could find their way past buzzer and iron gates. A show with one painting is gutsy. I can’t blame Hannah Hoffman for showing only this one as the other cityscapes Thek made around the time aren’t, for the most part, very good. He is by no means a great painter. His paintings are hit or miss. Counterintuitively, that is part of the appeal. Thek takes big swings, unconcerned by questions of reception, taste or consistency. Untitled (rooftops) is great precisely because of its casual tastelessness. The colors are delightfully garish. There’s something amateurish or vernacular to both the mode of painting and the

subject matter. Unlike much of Thek’s late-career paintings that embrace naivete, going so far as to be hung at the eye level of a child, this painting has a maturity, but one that is painted rather haphazardly and is underhandedly traditional in scope.

It’s all in the color competition between the yellow and purple. The dynamic between these complementary colors (according to the traditional RYB color model), perfectly split down the middle, creates a tension of taste. The shadows are also in complementary colors of indigo and sharp cheddar-cheese orange. While theoretically scientifically pleasing, Thek’s formulation has a too-muchness to it.

Untitled (rooftops) was made while Thek was dying of AIDS in his East Village apartment. His subject matter is thus limited to his immediate surroundings. A problem arises around how much we allow context to seep into our reading of the work. I have competing desires about whether or not to romanticize this painting’s timing. The image of Thek on the eve of his deathbed, staring out of his West Village apartment, makes for a sentimental and melodramatic reading of this painting as reflective of the agony and ecstasy of a life’s sunset. I don’t see this impulse as disrespectful, but rather perhaps too easy and teleological. Would this be a good painting under different conditions? Perhaps this is an unaskable question: off-limits.

In 1981, in response to his sculpture The Tomb, Thek said, “Imagine having to bury yourself over and over.” Does Thek deserve to be buried once more? Beyond the formal appeal of this painting’s tastelessness, its transcendent quality exists in the interplay of presence and absence. There’s a saintly quality—a martyrdom—to Thek, or to any artist who dies of AIDS. The act of conflating the biography with the actual work becomes a guilty pleasure. This type of analysis—fetishization of an artist’s death to AIDS—flatters both artist and reviewer. In this case, Thek’s biography packages the chaos that is his oeuvre. The single painting becomes a stand-in for both his body and a window much like Thek’s own.

We’ll allow the biographical to the extent that it is also formal: Untitled (rooftops) has a Rear Window quality of escape from confinement by binocular focus on the window’s contents. In direct opposition to the voyeurism of Hitchcock, Thek exhibits a sense of awe and optimism about the world. Instead of the dark underbelly of New York that Hitchcock examines, Thek exposes the light, and instead of human drama, Thek looks at the sublime drama of the skyline. Because death is coming from within, the beyond is allowed to be beautiful.

—Sonia Hauser

Februar y 1 - March 20, 2025

Kellogg University Art Gallery, Bldg. 35A

Alice Bag photographed by

Josef Jasso

WHAT AND WHERE ARTISTS EAT

Proteins like fish and chicken I tend to stay on the leaner side of meats or I don’t have animal protein at all. I will substitute it with beans or falafel. Garlic and spicy peppers are also a huge key point in my diet—I absolutely love fire—food isn’t the same without it. Eggs tho, I eat a lot of those. Haha when I was in LA I would buy Just Egg which was a substitute but prefer eggs for sure.

For the most part I am a fairly green eater—I love fresh fruits and veggies, I’m a spicy mami.

BRANTE FLORES

A slice of Petite Breakfast Brie from Marin French Cheese Co. (Trader Joe’s), two custardy-yet-firm soft-boiled eggs, one cup of blueberry Greek Nonfat Yogurt, fruits (usually berries or grapes), moka pot brewed coffee.

Here’s a sandwich I’ve been making: The Beet, Egg, and Hummus Sandwich (beets, sliced hardboiled egg, hummus, arugula, mayo, pepper, chili pepper flakes)

And here’s a restaurant recommendation:

The breakfast taco salad at El Tarasco (Venice Beach)

The breakfast taco salad is not on the menu at El Tarasco. But if you ask nicely, they will sub out the meat for fried eggs and you can enjoy the breakfast taco salad of your dreams. And then you can walk it off on the Venice Pier.

STEVEN WOLKOFF

EUNICE TANDIONO

So what I eat everyday, I work with my dad and brother and we usually head to my dad and mom’s house where we will eat pretty basic turkey sandwiches, chips, and a green tea. But my favorite is going out to galleries then swinging by El Coyote for an Enchiladas Howard and a couple scratch margaritas. Ask for Casanova and mix that with a few arguments on the art we just saw—which leads into a nice hour nap!!!!!! (This was also the place Sharon Tate ate her last meal)

DANNY MCCAW

I like going to Aloha, it’s a Hawaiian spot in my neighborhood. We even chose them to cater our wedding. Can’t go wrong with bbq chicken, macaroni, salads and mmmm spam musabis! When I’m kinda tipsy, I could eat 100.

Caesar Salad!

LIZ WALSH

The Turkish eggs at Lemon Poppy on Verdugo.

ANONYMOUS

I’m legitimately obsessed with Del Taco. Their breakfast rollers (egg, cheese and salsa wrapped in a tortilla) are like $1.50 each. I live on these. Plus I can’t buy eggs and make it at home for the same rate. Believe me, I’ve tried. Also their drip coffee (a take on cafe de olla) is not bad. ANONYMOUS

The Sublime and The Beautiful Revisited

Ascending even lower into the empyrean of autonomy, believing one’s own lies, the beauty that should only be seen through somebody else’s eyes.

A pointless exercise, no purpose does it serve: tracking one’s moves, getting on one’s own nerves.

But how can life otherwise be lived without these airless flights: descending ever higher into the abyss of self-conscious solitude.

— John Tottenham

Jimmy Komma’s Seven-Part Fire Diary Part 0

Yea, I will be speaking on the fires but first I need to visit the pale parts of them,  still untouched by the toxic sun, to breed  with them under uninhabitable ozone layers  of our westside sky.

Yea, before I pick up a pen, I need a lop-breasted angora sweater  in a South Pasadena jazz bar  with the crazed eyes of one who just moved here, who has never seen Casablanca, who has no connection to Calabasas, who plays bass, has a worked-on face, and sits now across the jazz bar,  under the red lights of my Last Unburnt Los Angeles Place.

I’ll get to the fire, yea... Shit, I even know who lit the match. But first, I need to secure some South Pas snatch. And failing that, A double-double at In-N-Out,

STAT

— Jimmy Komma

AN ARTIST  NARSISO MARTINEZ ANSWERS QUESTIONS

Top 3 songs?Strange Frui t (Abel Meeropol) interpreted either by Billie Holiday or Nina Simone, Strawberry Fields (John Lennon and Paul McCartney) Interpreted by La Santa Cecilia. I was attracted by the music video.

Top 3 dead artists?

Jean-François Millet (1814- 1875), Vincent Van-Gogh (1853- 1890), Käte Kollwitz, (1867-1945), David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896- 1974). 1 2

Give us an art world

horror story?

A dictator destroys and or censors art, defunds art organizations and art institutions, eliminates art education, and executes artists just to impose his or her own idea of what “good” art is to the masses. Most valuable lesson learned in art school?

I started doing art to save myself, but in art school I learned that art can give voice to the voiceless, therefore I now create art, not only for myself but also for my community.

I am here because this is my art home. I may have come to the U.S. seeking answers to my economic and cultural misery, and I found not only those answers, but also my purpose in life, that of highlighting the importance of farm workers’ contributions to the nation through my art. 3 4

5

Why are you here?

Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.

STAYING SANE ( ish ) Trying to Navigate LA WITH

Dear Dr. Trainwreck,

Can you talk about chasing fame and how that affects friendship? I’m from the Midwest and came out to California for art school. I’m fresh out of school (one year) and was able to get pretty good gallery representation early on so I count myself lucky. But a classmate that graduated at the same time keeps asking me how I did it. I’m happy to share. I’m not trying to gatekeep and I introduce them to my contacts (the few that I have). But in my core, I think the real issue is that they’re chasing fame as their primary goal rather than focusing on making art. I guess it shouldn’t bother me so much, to each their own, except that whenever we hang I also feel like I’m being strategically dissected to see what parts of me they can use and that will help them climb whatever ladder faster (not that I am famous by any means). They are actually quite talented and naturally brilliant, and everyone loves them, so it may just be me getting weirded out. I guess being a bit of an opportunist is normal in LA and isn’t necessarily a bad thing?

Signed, trying to navigate los angeles

PTSD, Trauma, Fires

What is to give light must endure burning. —Victor Frankl

TRAINWRECK DR.

Dear navigator,

Truth? People are opportunists everywhere, every field, every relationship. Not all the time, not every day, but on some level humans are usually pretty quick to take an opportunity when it presents itself. Now, that said, Los Angeles is in many ways the worst of the worst. Have you not noticed the first thing anyone asks you at some douchey Hollywood party is: What do you do? And they are not asking in an interested way, they are usually asking to find out who you know, and what you can do for them, and if you are worth talking to or if there is someone else in the room more powerful, hotter, better connected. You get the idea. Watch Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, or The Player, or LA Story. Those three get the general vibe of LA pretty perfectly. Now, what I do, and what I advise, is to sort of weigh how much you actually enjoy spending time with this person against how much it weirds you out or makes you uncomfortable. If you love them, and value the relationship, in a serious way, consider just talking to them about it. If they are an asshole, they will likely become terribly offended, defensive, and somehow try to make it all your fault. If they are a true friend, they will actually listen. You did not mention how old you or they are (I am assuming young, 20s?). If this is the case a little grace is owed, being as you are both still young and have a goodly amount of time to learn how to navigate not just LA but complex adult friendships. If you are older and they are behaving this way: Fuck ‘em. They should do better, but more importantly, you can spend your time doing something that makes you happy. Like creating art.

Be well, and do good things.

—Dr. C. Barnabas Westlake

I had this plan, I was going to spend each issue clarifying an overused, misunderstood and generally obnoxious term or diagnosis. Remember last time when I went on a tirade about ‘triggering’. I planned to do the same with narcissist, borderline, attachment styles, and so forth. Of course, I may still get there but I had to regroup. The fires. They fucked me up. And I do not even live in LA. I went through this – fires – twice before. We lost everything. Every structure, every memory, every photograph of my parents’ wedding. All of it – gone. And then, during the pandemic, after the house had been rebuilt and I, a grown person with allegedly marketable skills, had to leave the life I was building and stay with my mother, isolated and frustrated, the fires came again. Forced evacuation but only I left, probably because I was a nightmare to be around and they made me leave. I drove through smoke and falling ash and embers to my girlfriend’s house, crying most of the way, terrified and sad and completely unravelling. But I got there, and she immediately told me I was being dramatic, and it was not really that bad, and why did I have to make everything about me? We broke up. And then I blew her boyfriend, basically on principle, and I take great joy that she is ageing wretchedly So, fire scares the hell out of me. And I am heartbroken by the devastation wrought upon a city I truly love. Los Angeles is home to my closest friends – family really – and hundreds (thousands maybe) of perfect nights and days spent drinking. Bad choices and so, so much fun. I almost died in LA, more than once. I fell in love there, or so I thought. I met my heroes and my nemeses. I got lost in someone’s (James Caan maybe?) backyard in high school, at a party I barely remember except how much I liked kissing this guy Nathan, who took me home so we could fuck while listening to Too Short – which is the opposite of romantic but still irretrievably awesome. I will not, ever, say that the recent fires were triggering. I refuse. But they probably were. What I will say, however, is that now all the Coachella girls in their dumb hats and the hipster dudes whose pants are always a little bit too short, now when they say they

Confessions of a trans poly scaredy-cat, pt 1

Queer love is so much more dynamic, isn’t it? The breadth of possibilities also makes it difficult to parse the way forward sometimes. Is she flirting with me, or just friendly? Are they even queer? What lines are not to be crossed?

I met my partner of three years online, we dated casually for six months before deciding it could be more structured than that. We tried a monogamous arrangement for a few months in the middle of things and determined that it wasn’t helping. I’m a relentlessly horny person and my partner is not. Weirdly, I think she has more propensity to be ok with sex with strangers than I, although she doesn’t see herself as particularly non-monogamous.

Our lives have gotten more and more intertwined, and now her friends are my friends, but she has a strict “I don’t wanna meet my metas” type of policy for her own sanity. So, here’s the rub: I have discovered that a lot of my energy to take care of myself, do the tasks I need to do, clean up around the apartment, etc, is built on looking and feeling sexy and having fun sexy experiences with new people. This is incredibly difficult to manage in our current arrangement without changing something and has precipitated almost a two year dry spell... save the occasional period sex as my partner gets frisky when the moon rises.

I’m looking into self-pleasure mastery but I think the key to the energy-generation part of it for me comes from being with another individual. Frivolous one-night things that aren’t at least somewhat soul-touching are not helpful in this regard. Also, I’m starting to have a crush on my roommate, but that’s already been brought up as a non-starter. Same with her roommates/friends. So here we are, feeling somewhat stuck and slowly letting go of all the tasks that I used to enjoy for the sake of them.

I can only imagine your answer to this may be very simple, short, and abrasive, but I look forward to it nonetheless.

Floundering From Fidelity

have experienced trauma it will – likely for the first time – be true.

Because trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are real. They happen. People become the walking wounded, with something shattered in their eyes. I have seen it too many times to count, clinically, socially, in my family and in the mirror. Which is why I cannot stand to hear some 20-year-old who has never experienced anything, ever, say she has PTSD from that time a bouncer refused her entrance to a club, or some such nonsense. It devalues and undermines the severity and impact PTSD and trauma have on the world.

Now, here is a quick and dirty cheat sheet for what PTSD is. Really. According to any doctor, psychiatrist, psychologist, clinical social worker or nurse worth their salt:

A diagnosis of PTSD requires at least one item from the following 6 categories:

1. One must have been exposed to death, threatened death, actual or perceived serious injury or be the victim of actual or threatened sexual violence. Either through direct exposure, witnessing the event, learning that a loved one has been harmed, or what is known as indirect exposure, which relates most commonly to first responders, medics, therapists, and others who hear about or engage with trauma on a professional basis, which is often referred to as ‘vicarious traumatization’.

2. The individual continuously reexperiences the trauma through one or more of the following symptoms: unwanted memories, flashbacks, nightmares, physical reactivity (i.e., freezing, elevated heart rate, panic attacks, narrowed vision, catatonia, and other adrenal fear responses), and emotional distress after being exposed to traumatic reminders.

Dear FFF,

Well, fuck. This is indeed a quandary. I will be as gentle as I can: two people with very different sexual needs are unlikely to make it. Or at least not happily. Your letter reads like someone who is giving up a lot for someone else – not usually a good sign. And they seem to be placing a LOT of restrictions on whom you are allowed to shag. Which leads me to believe that perhaps they are not as OK with multiple partners as they are pretending to be. Which is obviously going to become a bigger and bigger problem. I think that part of the fun of being queer and poly and generally ‘relentlessly horny’, is the variety, the first kisses, the long nights getting to know someone different in a sexy, intense-but-different-than-primaryrelationship-way. You are depriving yourself of so much. And for what? Someone who gets down (goes down?) once every couple months at best, and has effectively curtailed your extracurricular activities. In all seriousness, what are you getting

3. A person suffering from PTSD will assiduously avoid trauma-related stimuli by eschewing trauma-related thoughts or feelings and/or trauma-related reminders.

4. Two or more of the following elements must be present, and they must have begun or become more severe after the trauma: Inability to recall key features of the trauma, overly negative thoughts and assumptions about oneself or the world, exaggerated blame of self or others for causing the trauma, negative affect, decreased interest in activities, feeling isolated, and problems with experiencing positive mood or affect.

5. Two or more of these arousal symptoms must have begun or increased in severity after the trauma: difficulty

from this relationship? In a very abbreviated and slightly flippant answer I might say that if you are in a partnership, and not getting laid, just be friends. Or not. But you sound unhappy, frustrated, and kind of lonely. So, what are you doing? Because it sounds to me like you are slowly fading away – becoming someone you might not actually be. Fuck a bunch of THAT. Being who you are is already complicated, dangerous, scary, often lonely and forever misunderstood. Add to that the current political climate and I say you, of all people, should have as much fun as you can. Before your love, your lifestyle, and your fundamental being, becomes illegal.

Also,TWO YEARS?!?! No amount of self-gratification can make that right. In fact, I am sad even thinking about it. Two years in which you could have – should have – been using to be not just good to your partner, but good to yourself. And part of being good to yourself is (according to your letter) about getting sexy, keeping your home wonderful, and experiencing new adventures with new people.

Your way forward seems pretty obvious to me, and it sucks. But being with someone who is not right for you also sucks, but it sucks for longer, and causes more damage, and breaks not just your heart but your spirit.

Good luck my floundering one,Be well, and do good things. I’m gonna have to motor if I wanna be ready for that funeral.

Email questions to: drtrainwreck@artillerymag.com

If you are seeking further information relating to the diagnosis, treatment guidelines, effects and impacts of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, below you will find a partial list of reliable websites. I would much rather you refer to these sources, or contact me directly, than fall down a rabbit hole of internet misinformation.

The National Institute of Mental Health

https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration https://www.samhsa.gov/resource/dbhis/national-center-ptsd

World Health Organization

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/post-traumatic-stress-disorder

PTSD: National Center for PTSD https://www.ptsd.va.gov/

See page 74 for a selection of quality peer reviewed scientific articles.

sleeping, irritability or aggression, risky or destructive (included self-harming) behavior, hypervigilance, increased startle response, and poor concentration.

The above symptoms must persist for more than one month, cannot be attributed to medication, substance use, or other illness. Finally, the expression of PTSD must cause the individual impairment, either socially, occupationally, interpersonally or otherwise, and distress. In therapist parlance it must be ‘an area of clinical concern’.

Got it? Now, I know that was boring but there is just no way to make PTSD sexy or fun. There just isn’t. And it slithers its way into every place, every life, every story. Like a many-tentacled monster, the symptoms and damage reach far beyond the individual, reducing people, costing us both emotionally and financially. PTSD shortens life expectancy, increases the likelihood of substance abuse, contributes to domestic violence and destroys families. It costs the nation billions of dollars a year, and we in the US basically do the bare minimum to address it. Suffering from PTSD is like living with cancer, only nobody feels bad for you. Stigmatization and flat-out denial of treatment run rampant, while bullshit ‘cures’ make people rich. Ketamine, ayahuasca, and MDMA (basically any psychedelic trip that costs 20 grand and is led by a white dude –usually handsome and wearing a lot of linen) have become disturbingly prevalent, and are lauded as a ‘miracle treatment’. Unfortunately, the obnoxious white guy in many scarves guiding you on your journey of healing is not licenced, not trained, and probably knows fuck-all about the chemicals he is messing about with. These trips are unregulated and absolutely not a good idea to get into without actual guidance, and integrative therapeutic treatment. And then, of course, we have our EMDR, a treatment lauded for its evidence base but complete nonsense if and when one actually examines said research. All of it becomes overwhelming, disheartening and infuriating. Well, fuck that. Yes, the world happens to us, and there is no predicting what it might do tomorrow. Which is why, in the aftermath of this devastation, I want us all to draw our loved ones to us and celebrate the time we have, to be existentialists, if only for a moment, and remember that Victor Frankl survived the camps of WWII and emerged with his humour, brilliance and joy, still intact. You know how he did it? Neither do I.

In all seriousness, if you want help, or want to know more about PTSD, for the love of George Michael do not seek answers on the internet. Please just email me. I am happy to provide a succinct list of reliable articles and can offer some guidance regarding treatment options and referrals.

—Dr. C. Barnabas Westlake

665 W. Lancaster BLVD

Lancaster, CA, 93534

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in collaboration with the Riverside Art Museum; California State University, Northridge, Art Galleries; Lancaster Museum of Art and History; and Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College.

JANUARY 25 - APRIL 13, 2025

Local Access is a series of American art exhibitions created through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by LACMA as part of the Art Bridges Cohort Program. Image Credit: Wendy Red Star Indian Summer, 2016 Los Angeles County Museum of Art Gift of Loren G. Lipson, M.D.

Continued from page 51

painting technique see anything special about Kehinde Wiley’s touch, the many more casual viewers drawn in by the confrontational Afro-opulence of Kehinde Wiley’s paintings are generally disgusted or at least wrong-footed when they discover how much of each one was painted by assistants. The “work” on display in a Wiley is that of a supervisor—as any curator of contemporary art surely knows.

What does it mean for a curator to assemble a show claiming the public enjoys a piece based on qualities that curator can be sure it does not have? MOCA seems to be attempting to redefine the movement with neither the high-snob connoisseurship necessary to tell one painter’s technique from the next nor enough of the common touch to have ever spoken to regular museumgoers about paintings they like.

Over-curated shows are at their best when they fail and Photorealist genius does manage to occasionally surface here despite its existence being denied. The aggressive dryness of Duane Hanson’s three-dimensional Drug Addict (1974) makes a good argument for its lack of ostentation—you feel genuinely like you’re invading a man’s privacy. Marilyn Levine’s trompe-l’oeil ceramic sculptures of old leather goods are almost too skilled—while a private collector might feel free to flick one and hear the satisfying earthenware echo, a museum viewer who reads the label begins to wonder why they’re left staring, fascinated, through a plexiglass box at what for-all-theworld is just a thrift store handbag. The eye/intellect mismatch in the incoming information is a genuinely provocative moment in a show that could use a few more.

—Pat Williams

Scientific Articles on PTSD

Continued from page 72

Bryant RA. “Post-traumatic stress disorder: a state-of-the-art review of evidence and challenges.” World Psychiatry. 2019.

Available from: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31496089/

Cukor J, Olden M, Lee F, Difede J. “Evidence-based treatments for PTSD, new directions, and special challenges.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 2010.

Available from: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20955329/

Martin A, Naunton M, Kosari S, Peterson, Thomas J, Christenson JK. “Treatment Guidelines for PTSD: A Systematic Review.” Journal of Clinical Medicine. 2021.

Available from: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34575284/

Yunitri N, Chu HC, Kang XL, Jen HJ, Pien LC, Tsai HT, et al. “Global prevalence and associated risk factors of posttraumatic stress disorder during COVID-19 pandemic: A meta-analysis.” International Journal of Nursing Studies. 2021.

Available from: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34856503/

GALLERY D gO S

Photos by Bob Coulter and Artillery Staff

I’ve moved around, a lot. Not kicked around, just trying to find some dirt that was my own, and mebbe some puzzled hands for this jigsaw heart. And in all of that highwaying, i found that, no matter the burg i plopped down in, i could get a job driving a taxi.

The organization of them all was pretty much the same – quite loose, and almost exclusively cash. Plus i’m good at talkin, and a very good driver (very good). It’s a job rife with and propped up by grift, deals, timing, and adaptability. It’s a gypsy joint, and i probably have half a million miles under my hack belt as a result.

My taxi was almost a rolling haven, i kept it clean and smelling good - burning Palo Santo and Nag Champa ( but just barely), and keeping the cassette deck fed with Billie Holliday, or the Replacements, The Ramones, the Risky Business soundtrack, or the half Tribe Called Quest/Redman slab. i had it covered, i thought.

TAXI DRIVER

When it was just me, or my bestest regulars, it’d be Ani DiFranco, or Willie & Waylon, or The Dead, or some cobbled together mix from bands and folk that i knew – from Gainesville, or Morgantown, or Denton, and sometimes Roanoke. In the daytime, there was always the latest issue of SPIN on the back seat.

And i had this on the dashboard.

An older black woman who’d soon become a regular finally asked me about it after the 4th or 5th trip. Most folks didn. Now, there was a St Christopher sticker on my clapboard, a wee pic of Ganesha tucked into my Hack License, and my call

sign (“Alamo”) plate, too, but few saw that from the back seat.

She rode in the front. She had to.

Even though Taxi etiquette should always keep the rider in the back seat. Don’t think that they want you up there. They do not. Like the bartender, like the stripper. They do not.

I’d take her to and from dialysis 3–4 times a week, and she just wanted to ride with me. So much so that her daughter would skip the dispatch and become one of the riders who’d call me directly on my cell phone. My cell/bag phone. $200 a month and as big as a pack of hot dog buns AND a pack of hot dogs, but worth it.

But i digress.

We’d wrangle her wheelchair up to my Crown Vic, and she’d whip out this wellpolished (but wheel-less) skateboard and slide across it to the seat. Then i’d fold her chair and tuck it behind mine. She’d cronch her soft ice.

And she always asked me when i was gonna get a Pete Fountain tape, and she was surprised that i knew who Pete Fountain was. She’d tell Jesus to ride with me while she was plugged in, so that i’d be the one to come get her.

“So, why is it a ghost Jesus?”

I knew exactly what she was asking about. “Well, it ain’t Jesus” i explained.

“Well,” she drew it out, diving for a taunt, “who in the shit else would be in a robe on a dashboard, watchin us?”

“That’s Obi-Wan Kenobi” i offered, not looking at her. “A Jedi Knight.”

Not even a pause from her. She was primed when she got in. She’d been planning this one. “Mmm Hmmm. A Knight. What’s he do?”

And i told her, of course,

“The jedi are guardians of peace in the galaxy. Obi-Wan is just a cool one of them. But he was struck down by Darth Vader. And, when that happened, Obi-Wan still had the determination to be a Jedi Knight, so his obligation to the greater good kept him around, but kind of like a ghost.”

And you’d better believe that i said that with a straight face.

“Mmm hmmm. That sounds nice.” was all i got in return.

The trip was a short one, mileage-wise, but traffic could stretch out the time, and even with the immunity that taxi gives a white boy, i drove slowly through her neighbourhood. Seemed a bit longer this day.

It never came up again. She still asked jesus to ride with me, but now she’d say “you all”.

Predictably, her health went south, and i quit taking her, or her daughter, anywhere. and i never got a Pete Fountain cassette.

I still have this Obi-Wan, though.

Studio of Karla Diaz.

gallery, photo by Jose Cordon.

Lud olo gy

I’m located at an arts institution (free to the public on Tuesdays).

I’m a painting by someone who is better known as a sculptor.

I’m older, but not ancient.

I live in the permanent collection.

I have color, but it’s severely limited (I’m mostly shades of white)

I was painted by someone who was alive during WWI.

Both the model and the painter tried to mutually exhaust each other during the sittings.

The first time the publisher saw me, she cried for 3 hours.

Send a selfie of you in front of your guess so we can see both clearly. The first 10 people to guess correctly will be featured on Artillery’s instagram feed! Game lasts until April 30, 2025.

Send your answer to: editor@artillerymag.com lu·dol·o·gy /l(j)uˈdɑlədʒi/ n A field of cultural studies that examines games, the act of playing them, and the players and cultures that surround them. It is also known as game studies or gaming theory. Oxford Reference

GUSTAVO DUDAMEL

DIANA ROSS ALABAMA SHAKES JOHN LEGEND

YO-YO MA & ANGÉLIQUE KIDJO GRACE JONES

YUJA WANG CHICAGO

HIATUS KAIYOTE SNARKY PUPPY

CYNDI LAUPER

Through May 4 Getty Center

Image: The Calling (detail), 2003, María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Diptych of Polaroid Polacolor Pro photographs. Collection of Jonathan and Barbara Lee. Courtesy of and © María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Text and design © 2025 J. Paul Getty Trust

Organized

J. Paul Getty Museum and the Brooklyn Museum