Fabrik Magazine

Information at The Signal: A Conversation With Ed Ruscha

Jesi Khadivi — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:00:57 +0000

HOLLYWOOD IS A VERB. © Ed Ruscha. Edward Ruscha Studio.

ED RUSCHA is as much a part of LA as its sunsets, freeways, wildfires, and beaches. Lest we limit him as a regionalist, let us remember that California itself is a slippery character, an idea as much as a place. As the artist incisively observed in one of his late 70s pastels, “Hollywood is a verb.” Ruscha moved to LA from Oklahoma to attend Chouinard Art Institute in 1956. While a student there he fell in with what he jokingly refers to as the “wrong crowd”: artists like Billy Al Bengston and Robert Irwin, pioneers of LA Pop and the Finish Fetish movement, which appropriated the seductive sheen of Southern California topography, car culture, and surf culture. Ruscha and his colleagues were key progenitors of California cool. Working in relative isolation compared to New York, the contemporary art center of the 60s and 70s, Ruscha is a prolific producer of paintings, drawings, photographs, and books that draw directly and indirectly from LA as a subject, and have played a critical role in creating its cultural mystique today. He spoke to Fabrik about the germinal days of the LA art scene and his evolving relationship with the city.

THE BACK OF HOLLYWOOD. 1977. Oil on Canvas. 22 x 80 inches. Edward Ruscha Studio. © Ed Ruscha.

HOLLYWOOD. 1982. Oil on Canvas. 22 x 80 inches. Gagosian Gallery. © Ed Ruscha.

HOLLYWOOD, SUNSET, SANTA MONICA, VINE. 1998. Acrylic on Canvas. 70 x 138 inches. Gagosian Gallery. © Ed Ruscha.

Fabrik: Did you feel like LA was an outpost when you started working here? Like there was a small group of artists, intellectuals, filmmakers, and writers that were in on some sort of secret?

Ruscha: LA is such a huge megalopolis that I need to centralize my thinking about it. I am out in Venice now, but I “grew up” in Silver Lake, Echo Park, and Downtown. My deeper feelings are centered in Echo Park and Hollywood.

It was a much smaller art world in a much slower city back in the 60s. I went to art school for about four years thinking I would be a sign painter or work in advertising, but I set off into fine art instead. The pendulum swung to the other side and I never really looked back. LA was like the Australia of the art world, it was way out there. But there were some key people here that were connected to the art world at large. One was Walter Hopps, the former director of Pasadena Art Museum. He created the first major show of Marcel Duchamp’s work. The artistic activity back then is only magnified today. It’s a much bigger art world and a much bigger museum world. We only had a very limited LA County Museum and no MoCA.

Fabrik: In the contemporary art world it seems like where an artist is based is loaded with meaning. Was there any cache in being an LA artist in the 60s and 70s?

Ruscha: It seemed like your area code was all important. 212 was it and 213 was Australia! While Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns were artists, I was an LA Artist. It’s much broader now, but back then there was a little tag that was tied to your toe when you worked out here. You were a regionalist.

Fabrik: Are there any current LA artists or art venues that you find compelling?

Ruscha: There are so many art galleries that come and go. The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a great place. And the Center For Land Use Interpretation, right next door. I think those two places are some of the diamonds in the rough as far as LA. But things pop up all the time that I don’t even know about, but I’ve got my ear to the ground.

Fabrik: The art critic Peter Plagens once said that while other Los Angeles based artists had the LA look, you “look at LA.” What is it about LA that you find so compelling to look at?

Ruscha: I tend to borrow things from LA. Some of these ugly buildings I see in LA are really food for thought. Some of the simplest things in the world help me view and understand LA. When the sun is shining here there is this remote tie in with glamour that other cities don’t have. This place doesn’t seem to have anywhere to look up to. It’s totally open ended… But I think it goes back to simple things like orange trees, the sun shining, freeways, and Chicano car stylings. Chicano car styling is one of the most treasured cultural icons of Los Angeles. You can’t transpose that anywhere else.

Fabrik: Do you feel like your work is influenced by LA’s cultural fabric? Is any particular field a conscious inspiration for your work?

Ruscha: It’s a back door influence. It’s not something visible where one could say “Ah ha! These lines that he makes refer to early 20th Century Craftsman housing!” It doesn’t happen that way with me. I’m more influenced by dreamy things. In a lot of ways I am disconnected from LA, but in many ways I’ve got my basic thoughts and desires about where I am living and they are still solid.

Fabrik: It’s interesting that you mention dreams. Your work has an intimate relationship with film, an evocative quality that is equally nostalgic and playful.

Ruscha: When I first went to New York at about age 20 I felt like I was in a familiar land. Movies laid out the carpet that I would walk down to see the city. It was kind of like going to Oz. The same thing happened with LA. It seemed like movies initiated me to new lands. I can’t be exactly specific, but I’m inspired by the clichéd activities in films. For example, in movies from the 40s there was always a train that was depicted as a little spot in the lower right hand corner of the screen and it would always emerge with all of its whistles and steam in the upper left hand side of the frame. It was a bridge between plot action when people were moving from one place to another. It had a powerful, cinematic suggestion to me that directly came into my work as an artist. I still dig the diagonal (laughs).

Fabrik: You’ve said in the past that you make work unburdened by art history. Is this still the case?

Ruscha: I might have been a little aggressive saying something like that. There is nothing that I’ve looked at before that hasn’t somehow had an influence on me. Even the junk I hate has a molding effect. I’m incredibly burdened in some ways, but I also have a way of tossing that off when I am working and making things fluid. I don’t work with a feeling of anguish.

Fabrik: At one point you said that your work was tied to the decadence and frustration of city life. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that a little bit and tell me if that is still the case.

Ruscha: It probably is. I look at the unfortunate things: misfortunes, underbellies, sadness. The things that go on not just in a city, but everywhere. The weight of history and all these things can be looked at negatively, but they also can be looked at positively. I see a lot when I drive here. Sometimes I’ll just be driving along and I’ll see a building that just assaults me and insults my intelligence. And the entire thing is so nasty its like having someone spit lemon juice in your face, but there is some effect there that makes me roll on and continue and make something of it. These negative things do work in my favor. They influence me to take motion on things. And that’s where I think my art comes from.

Story Links:
Ed Ruscha: http://www.edruscha.com
Museum of Jurassic Technology: http://www.mjt.org
Center For Land Use Interpretation: http://www.clui.org

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Morono Kiang Gallery: Portal To New Chinese Art

Peter Frank — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:59:11 +0000

Morono Kiang Gallery

Even after the Olympics, eyes remain fixed on China – that is, on the Chinese art scene. Over the past several years the floodgates have opened, and even as the international art world keeps penetrating this potentially vast, recently affluent market, a concomitant rush of new art is making its way out of the once-closed society. Chinese artists have actually been striving for decades to catch up with and participate in the world’s artistic discourse; finally, the world has been reciprocating, with mounting - and sometimes irrational – enthusiasm. Chinese artists now rattle the cages of the art world the way British artists did in the 90s: everybody wants a piece of them, although not everybody is sure what pieces to want.

Li Jin, Absinth, ink and color on paper, 71 x 38.5 inches, 2007. Morono Kiang Gallery

Oddly, new Chinese art has less of a presence in Los Angeles than in almost any other international art center. One can surmise why, but that’s the facts. There have been few exhibitions, commercial or institutional, of Chinese work in these parts. Marc Richards was the first gallerist to introduce the work here, as part of his dealing in all forms of Chinese art; but he has chosen to merchandise rather than program contemporary Chinese art (except when working with IKON Gallery in Bergamot Station – which happens to have a show of Chinese print editions, “China Wakes,” on view through October). Only two contemporary galleries in town specialize in exhibiting Chinese artists. Happily, the two present complementary programs, DF2 in West Hollywood specializing in more established, more imagistic work and Morono Kiang downtown oriented more to younger artists and conceptual modalities. DF2 has a branch in Beijing; Morono Kiang has only a residence there – one which long preceded the gallery’s existence.

In fact, when Karen Morono and Eliot Kiang moved to Beijing from Los Angeles in August 2001, knowing pretty much no one there, they had no intention of creating a gallery, or doing anything but checking out the art scene in their newly adopted home. They were in China to be in China, nothing more or less. Within two years they had worked on a book documenting the building at the heart of the local art scene, “Beijing 798,” an abandoned factory with a fascinating back story that had filled up with artists, and then galleries. The book helped stave off imminent demolition, partly by diverting the increasing stream of Beijing’s art visitors into 798’s doors. From that point on, Kiang and Morono were fixtures in the local art world, and made sure their connections kept leading them to smart, gifted younger artists – the ones being overlooked by the high rollers from New York and Berlin.

Li Jin, Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, ink and color on paper, 21 x 94 inches, 2008. Morono Kiang Gallery

Morono and Kiang went bi-continental in 2006, returning to Los Angeles without giving up their Beijing flat. They opened their gallery in May of last year, after one of their more devoted clients revealed himself the owner of several buildings in the emerging Old Bank arts district. One of these is the Bradbury Building, a landmark famed for its elaborate interior. Morono Kiang’s storefront space on 3rd Street doesn’t provide access to the building’s fabled lobby, but it does situate the gallery in a handsome, high-ceilinged space near the epicenter of the quickly artsifying neighborhood. In their first year and change, Morono Kiang have presented a tightly curated sequence of solo and thematic group shows, revealing a cerebral generation of Chinese artists – most from Beijing and the new-media center of Hangzhou – responsive to social and even political events, ideas about language and image, and the relationship of traditional artistic practice to our newly mediated world.

Hong Hao, Bottom No. 1, 67 x 114 inches, collected by Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008. Morono Kiang Gallery

Hong Hao, About Him No. 1, type-C print, 39 x 78 inches, 2005. Morono Kiang Gallery

“The thing that struck me about contemporary Chinese art when I first started looking at it,” muses gallery co-owner Eliot Kiang, “was how un-Chinese it was.” This was not what they expected to find when they moved to Beijing. Instead of so many traditional scroll painters and calligraphers and leftover Socialist Realists, offset by a small cadre of post-neo-expressionists maintaining a beachhead of partly understood internationalism, they found a lively and complex discourse maintaining on many levels, with groups of artists constantly taking on new ideas and new topics. “A new generation of artists,” Kiang observes, “emerges every five years.” What unites these generations, whose experiences in such a fast changing society are notably different from one another, is their awareness of and responsivity to international ideas and to recent western art history – and their urgent need to make themselves part of that history and those ideas while making those ideas and that history their own. By “un-Chinese” Kiang doesn’t mean anonymously international, but liberated from the constraints of national tradition and cliché.

Xu Ruotao, Red, oil on canvas, 83 x 70 inches, 2007. Morono Kiang Gallery

Of course, that tradition is still available, allowing an artist such as Liu Qinghe to expand upon Chinese watercolor technique and still seem contemporary. Hong Hao’s use of old maps and textbook pages is also redolent of a past that goes back beyond the years under Mao. But Hao’s project is also intellectually hip in its investigation of language and identity, and the majority of Morono Kiang’s artists are as likely to resort to a camera as to a brush (or scissors) to conduct similar investigations. The gallery in effect has put its best foot forward this month, not in its own space but out in Riverside, where UC Riverside’s downtown Sweeney Gallery has a carefully selected display of Morono Kiang artists called “Absurd Recreation”. The selection is heavy on the photo- and video-documentation, often of situations set up by the artists themselves; Chen Wei’s Countless Unpredictable Stands, for instance, posit the lone individual in absurd urban situations. Some of the most striking work is sculptural or painterly, notably Xu Ruotao’s dense linear webs rendered in acrylic, seemingly abstract but clearly derived from some sort of digital input.

Nine artists comprise the roster of “Absurd Recreation.” Kiang, Morono, and their gallery director Sonia Mak will be the first to tell you that the selection shows but a sliver off the tip of the iceberg, even of the kind of heady, socially aware Chinese art their gallery champions. But it’s a good place to start. UCLA’s Hammer Museum sometimes shows projects by new Chinese artists, so it’s a good idea to keep tabs on their program over in Westwood. And hopefully the San Francisco gallery Limn will mount yet another of its own group shows of Chinese art down here (around the time of the January art fairs, if patterns persist). Finally, however, until the local market broadens and/or more curators get with the program, repeated visits to Morono Kiang, counterbalanced with equally regular check-ins at DF2, will keep you in touch with the real McCoy, not just the reproductions and breathless prose of the art magazines and sites. A whole new world - art world and world of thought – is looking at us out of China, and we really should look right back.

Hong Hao, About Him No. 1, type-C print, 39 x 78 inches, 2005. Morono Kiang Gallery

Hong Hao, Bottom No. 1, 67 x 114 inches, collected by Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008. Morono Kiang Gallery

Gallery Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 12 to 6
Address: 218 West 3rd Street, Bradbury Building, Los Angeles CA 90013
Contact: 213.628-8208
Website: moronokiang.com

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Visualizing A New Los Angeles, 1962-81: The Architectural Renderings of Carlos Diniz

Nicolas Olsberg — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:55:24 +0000

This portfolio is drawn from an exhibition at the Edward Cella Gallery in Santa Barbara that explores – through the drawings of one of the most important architectural illustrators of his time – the transformation of Los Angeles as it matured from a loose conurbation into the more self-conscious, consolidated, and monumental metropolis we know today.

CARLOS DINIZ

Carlos Diniz grew up in Los Angeles, studied Industrial Design at Art Center College and then joined Victor Gruen as part of a team developing promotional materials for the large-scale planning and shopping center schemes that Gruen pioneered in the Fifties. He left the firm six years later to found his own studio, collaborating with Art Krebs and other printmakers to produce the often elaborate visual documents employed to propose and promote new projects. With his work for the giant firms of SOM San Francisco, HOK St Louis and Minoru Yamasaki (whose World Trade Center Diniz portrayed in 1961), his practice rapidly expanded to a national level. He was soon providing promotional renderings for mega-projects throughout the world. By the 1980s, his picturesque approach to the downtown ‘festival place’ projects of the Rouse Company and to historicizing and humanizing massive schemes for London, Chicago and Boston made an enormous contribution to defining the urban aesthetic and sensibility that has marked the booming development of the last thirty years.

DRAWING THE FUTURE

Commissioned to portray sometimes quite rudimentary planning schemes as they might appear in final form Diniz proposed how their densities, siting and choreography would be perceived; and how their social patterns of occupancy and interaction might work. Precisely fleshing out a more or less exact architectural framework, his pen and ink drawings-made in preparation for the final prints or painted panels that would seduce investors, planning agencies, and public into backing the schemes – are magnificently fluid, using movement, shadow, a touch of color, and the peopling of space to animate a static design. From the vast archive of Diniz’s practice, the exhibition selects examples of these perspective drawings, showing how they worked with architects and planners to establish the great-city aspirations of Los Angeles from the final plan of Century City in 1962 – when the downtown core moved out – to the Grand Avenue schemes of 1980 – when after many false starts it began to move back in. Los Angeles in these years sputtered through successive phases of growth and decay, expansion and constraint, but we can see the city steadily moving away from the unabashedly vast panoramas, open plazas, and soaring scales of the Space Age toward the busy arcades, articulated layers, and street-like settings of the end of century.

STANDING APART

Century Plaza Hotel — Lower Level View, 1964. Minoru Yamasaki, Architect

Screen prints from the Krebs studio shows Diniz’s work early in the Sixties when, with the Hollywood studio system in free-fall and the city’s major industries beginning to drift away, new projects began looking toward a denser city at a different level and with further aspirations toward metropolitan style and grandeur. Minoru Yamasaki’s enormous Century Plaza hotel (1961-66) was conceived at an entirely modern scale, anchoring the western edge of Century City, a vast new office park on the back-lots of a major studio. There, in Welton Becket’s master plan, clustered high-rises, set above a huge mound of garage space, sat within a rectangular platform of their own, defying the 50-foot street front of the main arterial boulevards that had prevailed for over 40 years.

The Hollywood — Courtyard View, 1961. Paul R. Williams and David Jacobson, Architects

The Hollywood Suite — Front View, 1961. Paul R. Williams and David Jacobson, Architects

The Hollywood (c.1960) was an un-built housing and office complex designed primarily by Paul R. Williams. Oriented away from the street into an interior courtyard, the three 31 storey towers created a controlled envelope within a dense commercial grid. Marked by outdoor mezzanines and sunken plazas, a heliport, 5000 car garage, air terminal, hotel, theaters, restaurants and shopping center, it was to have been the largest single complex on the West Coast. In setting up a balanced fusion of metropolitan living with entertainment, meeting, tourist, business and retail spaces – a city center within a city – the project also anticipates, though in a much more persuasive language, the new live-in malls of the present day.

Theme Building — Century City, 1963. Welton Becket, Architect

LANDMARKS

Strategies for development in the years from 1962 looked toward concentrating its energies in more intense spaces, and to making their presence bolder and more conspicuous, scattering on the loose framework of Los Angeles the elements of a monumental city. Since the mid-fifties, the city’s once-absent cultural buildings had been promoted as a means not only to service art, music, theater and design but to punctuate the city’s wide horizon with symbols of a new sophistication. Such are Welton Becket’s un-built Theme Building for Century City (1962), which its developers actually described as ‘both cultural center and landmark’ and which Diniz therefore depicts as a shining beacon of light.

The boldest of these projects unites the central features of the ‘redevelopment’ era, Cesar Pelli and Tony Lumsden’s 1968 project, with DMJM, for Santa Monica Bay. Here a string of enclosed structures with different functions and expressions – from dwelling to work to culture – would actually stretch under the ocean to rise again in a transparent cylindrical tower. It is a set of discrete dense units organized into a campus, climaxing in a monumental landmark that celebrates the bay, which Diniz emphasizes through the Giacometti-like figures that give it scale.

Santa Monica Bay Village — Water Level View, 1968. Cesar Pelli and Tony Lumsden for Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall, Architects

Art Center Campus — Perspective View, 1968. Craig Ellwood, Architect

Art Center Campus — Perspective View, 1968. Craig Ellwood & Associates with James Tyler and Stephen Woolley, Architects

Diniz shows Pelli’s huge ‘blue whale’ – the first phase of his Pacific Design Center (designed 1972-1974) – with heightened perspective, capturing the impression of a skyscraper on its side, its horizontal lines anchoring a great plaza that sets it off from the street; while Craig Elwood’s Art Center College – an entire campus folded into a single covered bridge – is drawn like as a great line across the hills, at once a testament to the persistent horizontality of Los Angeles and a landmark, like the blue whale, to the city’s new sense of its self as a generator of innovative arts rather than a repository of the old ones.

PROMENADES

In the face of the energy crisis and the urban panic that marked the late sixties and early 70s, the strategy for center city revitalization dwelt on dense, massy, secure-able envelopes organized as walled super-blocks, largely blind to the street. As at the Bonaventure, space, energy and freedom were enclosed within, and the city presented only high above street level as a distant panorama. Charles Luckman’s Broadway Plaza (now Macy’s Plaza) of 1973 is compressed into a tight stack of barely differentiated brick clad forms. The city appears only in the revolving restaurant on top; yet the wide descending interior streetscape is a powerful one – a sort of Piranesian crystal palace whose glass falls only at street-side, Diniz’s vignette of the interior showing how its constructive geometries animated the space below them.

Grand Avenue Competition — Overall View, 1980. Maguire Partners with Harry Perloff, Barton Myers, Edgardo Contini, Charles Moore, Lawrence Halprin, Cesar Pelli, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, Ricardo Legoretta, Frank Gehry, Sussman Prejza, and Robert Kennard

Santa Monica Place — Interior Atrium View Final, 1972. Frank O. Gehry, Architect

Santa Monica Place - Preliminary Sketch 3rd Street Entrance, 1972. Frank O. Gehry, Architect

Gehry and Gruen’s Santa Monica Place, designed with the Rouse Company from 1973-80, reached across a number of busy city blocks in an effort to give density to a depressed zone near the pier. Setting up a mix of buildings and uses, streets and pedestrian plazas, it conveyed that sense of intensely animated outdoor space that marked James Rouse’s urban thinking. Only the enclosed shopping center – a set of high, arcaded promenades that spoke to a more traditional, almost Milanese sense of the streetscape – was built. But the idea that a highly articulated, colorful and varied parade of street-fronts might bring the city back to life persisted in the rejected proposition of the ‘All-Star’ team for Bunker Hill’s Grand Avenue (1980). This visionary promenade, its streetscape designed by Charles Moore and Lawrence Halprin, failed; but it fit Los Angeles perfectly – a festival place in the Rouse tradition, but devoid of historical reference, sentiment and reassurance, stretched out in a horizontal line and fusing as if by chance a confrontational mélange of buildings and materials at different scale. It is perhaps the last great imaginative flourish in a generation’s symphony of dreams for a city with a sense of grandeur.

Broadway Plaza — Overall View of Hotel, 1973. Charles Luckman + Associates, Architects

Broadway Plaza — Hotel Lobby, 1973. Charles Luckman + Associates, Architects

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Size Is Relative: Matrushka Construction

Aparna Bakhle — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:49:47 +0000

Laura Howe, Matrushka Construction

Artist and designer Laura S. Howe sews “Size is Relative” onto some of the labels identifying her clothing line. The practice informing this admirable flexibility can be experienced through her clothing store, Matrushka Construction. Every single one of the garments showcased in Howe’s airy and intimate Silverlake atelier is made by hand, on site, usually during store hours. New clothes appear weekly, if not daily. And although one might expect this constant production to create a bustling environment, the space is distinctly serene. Imbued with sensible irony, the clothes Howe creates embrace different shapes and many sizes. She even offers on-the-spot alteration to ensure a perfect fit. Her trademark stretchy fabrics invoke vintage looks while deconstructing classic cuts, often with a touch of wryness. As the collections on hand are always evolving, with no two items being exactly alike, customers feel compelled to return. This savvy strategy helps sustain Howe’s business and creativity.

Utilizing an industrial sewing machine, Howe and primary designer Lake Sharp “build” garments with inside out fabrics and multiple layers that playfully expose seams while integrating numerous loose threads that remain as purposeful traces of the designers’ handicraft. Howe’s political sensibility and environmental awareness (she’s on the board of WildPlaces, a nonprofit committed to ecological restoration, land use advocacy and education) is reinforced by her use of “remainder” fabrics from L.A.’s Garment District, upon which she silk-screens birds, trees, and other curiosities from the natural world, occasionally with slogans exhorting us to “Plant A Tree” or “Consume Less, Share More.” Howe’s motto for Matrushka Construction is “fashion for the people” and she envisions an intelligent, self-aware and involved proletariat.

Howe’s singular vision, enriched by her experience and training in sculpture, reveals a transparency of process found more often in nature than fashion. Although she references the urban energy of goth, punk and street styles, Howe grounds herself by running daily in Griffith Park and spending time whenever possible in Huntington Gardens. Her commitment to preserving the urban wilderness of Griffith Park has resulted in a laudable stewardship. Recently, Howe campaigned for and was elected to the board of the Greater Griffith Park Neighborhood Council (GGPNG). In her role as representative, she advocates tirelessly on our behalf to protect the park from politicians and developers seeking to monetize this sanctuary into a developed facility. Howe is working with the board as well as other preservationists to obtain Historic-Cultural Monument status for Griffith Park.

Matrushka Construction Store

Although influenced by early Soviet Constructivist ideals of objects being more than commodities, and art as a practice directed towards social purposes, Matrushka clearly resonates with Silverlake denizens as evidenced by the popularity of well-attended events, on-going performance pieces and rotating art exhibits held in the space. Opening September 20th, Matrushka presents the work of artist and curator Steve Wong. Having found a way to infuse fashion with meaning, Howe also makes it fun. Music playing in the store often finds expression in what she sews. Some local bands she loves listening to include Silversun Pickups, Radar Bros., and The Bird and the Bee. With Matrushka, Howe effectively erases the anonymous character of shopping for clothes and replaces it with the authentic and sustainable community we’re hard-pressed to find in densely populated urban environments, and perhaps especially Los Angeles.

Store Hours: Monday – Friday 12 p.m. - 7 p.m., Saturday – Sunday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Location: 3822 West Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90026
Contact: Fax & Phone: 323-665-4513 • http://www.matrushka.com

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The Indomitable Spirit Photography Auction

Chris Davies — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:47:03 +0000

Audrey Hepburn. © Douglas Kirkland

On November 13, Starlight Children’s Foundation is hosting a photography exhibit and auction in Los Angeles called The Indomitable Spirit to honor the inspirational strength of seriously ill children and their families.

Participating photographers have contributed portraits, landscapes and other images that they feel best exemplify the indomitable spirit that is displayed on a daily basis by the children and families Starlight serves.

If you are unable to join us on November 13, we invite you to share your support for The Indomitable Spirit by purchasing your favorite photograph today or making a donation. One hundred percent of each photograph’s “buy it now” price and every donation will support Starlight programs.*

To purchase any of the photos displayed in this gallery before November 13, please contact indomitablespirit@starlight.org.

If you would like to make a donation* to Starlight in honor of this event, click here.

November 13 Event Details

Co-Chairs:
Douglas & Françoise Kirkland
Marissa Roth

When:
Thursday, November 13, 2008

Where:
ACE Gallery
5514 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles 90036

6:30 p.m. - Cocktails and Hors d’Oeuvres/Silent Auction Opens
7:30 p.m. - Live Auction - Conducted by Bonhams & Butterfields
8:30 p.m. - Silent Auction Closes

To purchase tickets, click here.

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Jeff Hurlow “The Collector”

Aparna Bakhle — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:46:55 +0000

Jeff Hurlow

One of the first things I bought that I considered art was a Robert Rauschenberg poster I saw advertised in Playboy back around 1990. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit I was actually reading it for the art.

I don’t necessarily look at what I do as collecting art. It seems more like art gathering. As a child I’ve always collected things… Star Wars figures, comic books, grass hoppers… anything that caught my eye.

In college I studied art, so most of the earliest pieces I picked up were through trades and favors. I also remember distinctly thinking, “I have no desire to do this for a living.” To me, the gallery system seemed like a game with the odds stacked against you. There were few options for young artists, and I knew I didn’t want to wait tables or have a “day job” to support my art.

I decided to go into graphic design by accident and fortunately began having some success. I felt a little guilty about the money I was making, especially because so many friends were struggling to get their work noticed (and pay rent). So I would spend as much as I could on their art, which by my early salary was not much. Even with a limited budget, I felt at times like a patron… a not so wealthy one, but a loyal one.

I’ve been slowly adding new pieces to the collection for almost 20 years. In the early days, I would spend a lot of time making the rounds at galleries. San Francisco was miserable because everything was so far away, Los Angeles was a little better with clusters of galleries like Bergamot Station, and of course New York was the easiest. But the things that I remember most about that time were that gallery people are fucking snobs, I could afford virtually nothing and I liked about 5% of what was being shown. That being said, I still managed to find some great pieces and the collection slowly started covering any free wall space in our home. Some favorites from that time period include a bunch of drawings by Marcel Dzama from his first show at Richard Heller’s gallery, an amazing woven photograph from friend, Dinh Q. Lê for designing his exhibition catalogue, several folk art paintings from “Big Al” Taplett while visiting New Orleans, a Jeff Koons Balloon Dog and sculptures by friends Art Domantay and Alan Valencia.

During those early days, the collection was pretty eclectic, including sculptures, drawings, paintings, photography, prints, and small installations. Rather than any specific theme or concept, what really tied them together was location. I would only acquire a piece if I personally knew the artist, happened to walk into a gallery with their work or purchased something while traveling.

Jeff Hurlow looking for art online.

Today I approach collecting work in a fairly different manner. A large factor for this change is that I’ve reached a point where I know exactly what I want. I know what interests me and what work I find compelling. In the earlier days, it was more experimental so the collection was a little haphazard. The other factor is that my method for searching for work has completely changed. I’ve been working on the web for the last 7 or 8 years and I see it as the future of art collecting. I’ve now moved from art gatherer to art prospector. I’m addicted to sites like ffffound and Flickr and I end up trolling these sites for hours, searching for that right piece. Once I find a piece I love, I figure out how to contact the artist and do so immediately. Judging from the responses I typically get from artists, I believe this is still an unorthodox approach. I find this to be the most bizarre thing about the current gallery system. Collectors and artists are purposefully kept at an arm’s length from one another. I personally like the idea of being able to talk to an artist directly about their work and why they made certain decisions. I like the idea that there is a natural connection between the two, and that the work becomes more valuable and interesting through dialogue.

Another critical component of this relationship is that it inherently makes the work more affordable and therefore collectible by more people. Typically galleries collect a 50% commission on work sold. For artists to make any money to maintain a living, this cost must be passed along to the collector. Because of this higher price tag, many collectors are priced out and fewer pieces are sold. In my experience, I’ve always paid less for work, but the artists have actually made more because they are not paying a middleman. For me, galleries are like travel agents, they’re great if you’re loaded and don’t want to do any work, but a complete waste of money if you know how to find things on your own.

Some of Jeff Hurlow's art collection.

The downside of mining through basically anything available on the web is that there’s a ton of crap to wade through… but I’m a patient man. Again, knowing exactly what I’m looking for makes this much easier. My personal interests lie in drawings. It’s probably because that’s what I like to do so it appeals to me on an aesthetic level. I’m also very interested in the idea of relationships and how different artist tackle this theme in their pieces. Again, it’s an idea I find myself exploring over and over again in my work, so I’m naturally drawn to that subject.

The other day I was talking to a friend about art. He was talking about how he wanted art to challenge him and that he liked the idea of it not necessarily even appearing to be art at first. While I think that’s a noble and contemporary approach to art, I don’t think I share it. I love to see the pieces on the wall and I love when they’re aesthetically pleasing. That doesn’t mean I’m looking for something pretty to match the drapes, but they’re things that I end up living with for a very long time, and frankly I want to be able to look at them over and over again. Looking at the last half dozen pieces I’ve acquired, they all feel like they come from the same family. As time goes on, I find myself taking less and less of an academic approach to art and more of a gut level approach. I either like it or I don’t.

In the past month, I’ve added 4 new pieces to the collection by stumbling upon the work of Sidney Pink, Sarah Ferone, Lisa Hanawalt, and Matt Furie. For me collecting is an intensely personal experience. I don’t go into it thinking about how it will look with my furniture or whether or not it’ll be a good investment. In a way, they’re like the boxes in my garage filled with comic books, old toys and other scraps of my childhood.

Jeff Hurlow studied Art Studio at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has designed and art directed movie posters, print ads and websites for the likes of Warner Brothers, Sony Pictures, Disney, Columbia Pictures, Universal, First Look Pictures and Napster, and until recently, was the Director of User Experience Design for Yahoo!.

Jeff’s drawings have been the subject of solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. His online home is Dosmasks.com.

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Tanzore Restaurant

Oliver O. — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:46:53 +0000

Design Divo Reveals an Extreme Makeover

Tanzore Restauranr

Remember Gaylords, the only ‘fine dining’ Indian restaurant in Los Angeles for years on La Cienega? Same owners, but Tanzore is an ultimate frog-turned-prince makeover worthy of any reality show fodder. Ignoring the uninviting dark window exterior, I enter and am enveloped by an oceanic turquoise lounge, complete with transitional striped furniture, inviting pink throw pillows and blooming orchids. I have a strange urge to break out into Indian dance as I am mesmerized by larger-than-life screens showing couture cat walk fashion shows and Bollywood movies. Check out 333 Fridays, where the lounge gets some action as Indian and non-Indian DJ’s spin tunes and the bar sells $3 dollar Indian themed cocktails like Bombay Fever or Delhi Heat. If you are lucky enough, you may catch the general manager Paul (a white east coaster guy) showing off his expert Indian dance moves.

As I pull myself away from the blue lagoon lounge, a towering glass wine case transitions the lounge from the main dining room. The colors dramatically shift from cool to warm, reminding me of the spices found in Indian dishes like cinnamon and saffron. It’s a gay-sian delight: golden cubed lighting, an undulating wooden wall, flowery-striped wallpaper, burgundy ceilings and a central stone fountain. Even the private party room is fit for a king with textured, pearly walls, candle light and a massive antique haveli wooden door.

Very similar to the plate presentation of the tandoori sea bass, the dining room is over-decorated with its Cost Plus looking knick knacks placed in any available space. I don’t like to be challenged by the décor when I dine and these relic vases and pots are ‘things that make you go, huh?’ Between the fake floral arrangements and over knick-knackiness, it makes me reminisce of my Aunt Dora’s living room.

Overall, Tanzore redefines Indian fine dining sure to please the foodie or the fashionista in LA style and surely worth your time to explore, even if you are forced to watch TV as you visit the men’s urinal.

Tanzore
50 N. La Cienega Blvd, Beverly Hills, CA 90211
310.652.3894 • www.tanzore.com

Delights: Homemade Chai, Extensive Wine List,
Creative Fusion Menu,
Helpful Manager, Paul

Doozies: Fussy decor,
Needs more guests (too quiet)

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Dean Store

Lanee Neil — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:02:47 +0000

Dean Store

When is the last time you ran into a cool leather shop? Leather shops bring to mind either a haven for bikers or a generic leather store found in the local mall. Dean, a Sunset Junction boutique sells creative and colorful purses, belts, messenger bags, watch bands and more — all of which your grandpa or your fashionista self would delight in wearing.

In 1999, Dean was the leather child of LA artisan Danny Dean Davis when he sought to find a wide leather watch band that had both vintage and modern sensibilities. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention and it spurred Davis on to creating an entire line of leather goods using construction techniques like the whip stitch band of the past and melding them with fashion forward design and color.

Another thing that sets Davis’ shop a pasture apart from other leather shops is Dean hand makes everything on site and even has a solution for those that have environmental issues buying leather. An entire section of Davis’ creations are made from those out-dated leather jackets from thrift stores you wouldn’t be caught dead wearing now. You can find Dean at Barney’s too, but the shop is a worth a visit for the full sensory experience: leather aroma, tactile suede, and rich colors for the eye to behold.

3918 S. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90029
(323) 665-2766
deanaccessories.com

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Pull My Daisy

Lanee Neil — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:00:41 +0000

Pull My Daisy

Seven years running and the one of oldest stores in Sunset Junction, Pull My Daisy boutique offers playful, couture punk fashion for men and women. Owner Sarah Dale, spotlights local designers and artists, complete with a sex toy section. All jewelry and t-shirts are made locally. Currently, she’s selling two female artists’ taxidermy plushies, (imagine adult beanie babies with a sadistic touch). Every month, she is the hostess of Vrouw, a trunk show “for the regular sized female,” where nothing is under size 12.

Her vision for her shop and Sunset Junction is to keep it ‘home-grown’ and community minded with no aspirations to be the next Melrose. It’s working because last year she expanded to double the store’s size. Pull My Daisy seems to be the pulse of Sunset Junction as she knows everyone that comes in and her casual free-spirited vibe warms even the most ice cube personality.

If you want an original outfit for your next soiree or just want to take a photo in the old-fashioned photo booth with your pals, Sarah Dale welcomes all. She may even ask you to watch the store as she goes out to move her car.

3908 W Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90029
(323) 663-0608

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Bar Keeper

Lanee Neil — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:58:15 +0000

Bar Keeper

When out with my seventy-eight year old grandfather, I used to be embarrassed when he would send his martini to be remade not once, not twice but sometimes three times to get the perfectly chilled concoction of the gods. After an afternoon at Bar Keeper in Sunset Junction with owner Joe Keeper,
I have seen the light in the art of cocktail mastery. My grandpa is of the Rat Pack generation and this is exactly the kind of ‘spirit’ Bar Keeper offers to the new generation and the ‘old’ pro with vintage glassware, shakers, cocktail recipe books, campy drinking games and even absinthe supplies.

Joe sends out scouts to thrift stores and retirement communities hoping to score the perfect highball glasses, snifters, flasks or anything from the era gone by that revered the social cocktail hour as religious ceremony. He offers classes once a month where he invites a mixologist in and screens old drinking movies where you learn from Betty Davis or Clark Gable how to glamorously hold your martini glass without spilling its contents.

So the next time you’re invited to a party that may be serving mixed drinks in red plastic tumblers, bring the host a set of vintage bar glasses from Bar Keeper to subtly impress the message that it’s not just what’s on the inside that counts…not when it comes to the glory of cocktails at least.

3910 W. Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90029
(323) 669-1675
barkeepersilverlake.com

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