Art Talk

When talking about the L.A art scene in the 1960s, the name of the Ferus  Gallery is foremost. Founded in 1957 by Walter Hopps with artist Ed  Kienholz, it was a free-wheeling operation initially showing artists  from the Bay Area alongside the L.A. set.

It’s been almost 50 years since John Baldessari (b. 1931), one of the  most famous American artists, printed a lithograph with a written  statement, “I will not make any more boring art”. And, boy, has he kept  that promise all these years… the current exhibition of his prints at Laguna Art Museum is perfect proof that Baldessari has always been able to grab our attention.

If you had come from Lubbock, Texas to Los Angeles in 1962, as did artist Terry Allen, you’d come to believe that anything was possible. You could be an artist, or a songwriter or a musician. Allen became all of the above.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD is a well-known tragedy of the ancient world. Two nearby cities, Pompeii and Herculaneum, were destroyed, along with their populations. Everything was covered in layers upon layers of lava and ash. But somehow, this tragedy has a silver lining. Since the mid-18th century, archeological excavations of both cities have uncovered an unprecedented amount of artistic treasures – bronze and marble sculptures, well-preserved frescoes and mosaics, and the list goes on.

Any good exhibition of contemporary art that presents cultural developments abroad is a welcome and important way to better understand our allies and adversaries. The ambitious traveling exhibition that opened last month at LACMA, Allure of Matter: Material Art from China, is an excellent example of artistic and cultural collaboration at a time of an ongoing trade war between the US and China.

We tend to think of artists as people with sorts of egos that make them want to stay in the spotlight, to get attention. An exhibition of three important L.A. artists focuses, instead, on their various of methods of making themselves disappear. Aptly titled, Disappearing—California c. 1970 at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, this show is the first to look in detail at the conceptually-based art of Chris Burden, Jack Goldstein and Bas Jan Ader.

The last two weekends, I enjoyed four nights of amazing dance performances – two times on stage, at The Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and two times on the silver screen, at Laemmle’s Royal theatre.

We listen to recorded books and audio newspapers. We read on our laptops and phones. Reading words on paper would seem to belong to the antiquated 20th century.

The photographic exhibition at the Getty Museum, Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story, will break your heart, make you think and hope, and even smile a little. In the early 1960s, Gordon Parks was already a well-known photographer. So, it was no surprise that he was chosen by LIFE magazine to go to Brazil to report about the extreme poverty in Rio de Janeiro. It was pure serendipity that Parks connected with a 12-year-old boy there, Flávio da Silva, and his family, living in the unimaginable poverty of a Brazilian favela.

Walking into Art & Empire: The Golden Age of Spain at the San Diego Museum of Art, a map on the wall reveals the geography behind the world’s most far -reaching empire from the 17th to 18th centuries. Red arrows describe the extensive trade routes from the Iberian Peninsula to New Spain, from much of what is now Southern California to the tip of South America, as well as the Caribbean, Philippines and parts of Italy and Belgium.