ENTERTAINMENT
March 11, 2012 | By Susan Josephs, Special to the Los Angeles Times
Gideon Obarzanek can trace much of his artistic drive to a creative restlessness that stems, he says, "from an interest beyond pure dance. " "How can dance coordinate with other forms?" he asks. "This has been a creative engine for me, in that I've been able to make unique works. But it's also a frustration. Because a part of me always wants to go off and do other things and then I keep getting pulled back into a dance context. " Since founding the Australian dance company Chunky Move in 1995, Obarzanek has consistently pushed the boundaries of how contemporary dance can be viewed and understood through mining his omnivorous interests in theater, film, visual art, science and technology.
ENTERTAINMENT
March 4, 2012 | By Jori Finkel, Los Angeles Times
The floor sculptures that Mel Bochner made in the early 1970s now rank as classics of conceptual art. Arrangements of stones, coins and on occasion hazelnuts on the ground, they were designed to lay bare the first principles of sculpture. "I was trying to find out what the minimum definition of a sculpture was — what could be a sculpture and only a sculpture. It has to be three-dimensional," the artist said, reached by phone in New York. "And I wanted it to be a useless thing. A lot of pebbles you could put in your driveway; an individual pebble has no exchange value.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
February 25, 2012 | By Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Art Critic
Kenneth Price, a prolific Los Angeles artist whose work with glazed and painted clay transformed traditional ceramics while also expanding orthodox definitions of American and European sculpture, died early Friday at his home and studio in Taos, N.M. He was 77. Price had struggled with tongue and throat cancer for several years, his food intake restricted to liquids supplied through a feeding tube. Despite his infirmity, he continued to produce challenging new work and to mount critically acclaimed exhibitions at galleries in Los Angeles, New York and Europe.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
February 5, 2012 | By Joy Press, Los Angeles Times
Over more than a century, Dorothea Tanning collided and consorted with artistic titans of the 20th century who included Pablo Picasso, John Cage and Joseph Cornell. She designed sets for George Balanchine ballets, played romantic matchmaker for poet Andre Breton and appeared in Hans Richter's avant-garde films - but she remained best known as the wife of Surrealist Max Ernst, to whom she was married for nearly 30 years Tanning, who was also a celebrated American artist and poet, and came to be known as "the last living Surrealist," died Tuesday at her New York City home, according to the Dorothea Tanning Collection and Archive, a foundation she established in 1995 to preserve her work.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
February 3, 2012 | By Martha Groves, Los Angeles Times
A cloud hangs over cartoonist Paul Conrad's anti-nuclear war sculpture in Santa Monica. Faced with having to raise as much as $423,000 to repair the two-decade-old "Chain Reaction," city staffers have instead advised spending $20,000 to remove it. After hearing from activists eager to preserve the Civic Auditorium sculpture, the city's Arts Commission has recommended that the City Council vote to remove, or "deaccession," the work - ...
ENTERTAINMENT
January 29, 2012 | By Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times Architecture Critic
The new Matthew Marks Gallery in West Hollywood isn't just the first ground-up building by the 42-year-old Los Angeles architect Peter Zellner. A clean-lined, windowless stucco box on Orange Grove Avenue just south of Santa Monica Boulevard, it is also almost entirely free-standing. Attached on one of its four sides to a mortuary, it is otherwise visible in the round, making it one of the most conspicuous architectural debuts to appear in Southern California in a number of years. At the same time, Zellner's design operates in large part as the straightforward and accommodating backdrop for an artwork by the 88-year-old artist Ellsworth Kelly.