Stop. Hammer time.

The Museum not the happy-panted, white-collared big guy. This blog post would be more aptly titled Get Some Culture Up Ya as I wish to share with the world some wonderful artists I've seen here in LA. 

For those of you who don't follow art, suck it up and get some culture up ya.

Firstly, I saw a lovely exhibition of local contemporary LA artists at The Hammer.

Llyn Foulkes - Does some lovely 3D collages.

Charles Irvin - His work feel like it was made by an inmate of a mental deviancy institution. I like a bit of crazy in my artists though

Victoria Reynolds - Paints meat!! And titles her works things like Reindeer in the Snow. 

Lisa Anne Auerbach - Lots of feminisey knitted dresses and photography.

I also went to MOCA last Thursday before having dinner with the boy genius that is Tathom. Microsoft was paying for him to be in LA for a tech conference and subsequently was paying for us to drink at the hotel bar.

MOCA has a wonderful permanent collection but the Dan Graham works that are just passing through were the most wonderful. Very architectural. We all know this excites me.

Then there was LACMA. Oh LACMA, how you pleasantly surprised me. The Los Angeles County Museum has a varied collection, as you would expect, but where every city in this country has Warhol, Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns (whom I have concluded is the art world's Jack Kerouac - American, patriotic, slightly chauvinistic, incredibly and unfoundedly well loved) on show, here, they actually show rare pieces. How many times have I seen Warhol's Elvis? Quite a few, but at least at LACMA it was presented in conjunction with a bunch of his other crazy shit.

There was a wonderful collection of German Expressionist. I like these guys. They're really dark aesthetically and thematically. You know, animals eating people and stuff. 

There was this:

Work by Frank West

Which reminded me of one of my own works:

I call this piece Mould of the Large Intestine

And this:

It's hard to tell from the piccy but this installation was giant iron curves that created long winding corridors for you to walk through. Walking through these structures reminded me of that one time in High School when a bunch of us dropped some acid and walked to Richmondo KFC. The footpath seemed to go on FOREVER. Sorry Mum. Only happened that once. Promise.

Also! Also! There was no video art! Not one little itty bitty piece. Nosferatu was being screened but that is most certainly not video art. Thank you LACMA for having standards. 

I am going to go out on a limb and say this; I am so over Rietveld's Red/Blue Chair. You see one of these in Australia and its super exciting. It's a historically significant item. Here, though, Every. Single. Gallery. Has. One. Come on, Rietveld, give us something new already. 

Next to LACMA is the La Brea Tar Pits. The only reason I wanted to see them was because they are featured in a comic I read. Unfortunately I couldn't get underneath them to see if there really is a secret lair. 

My understanding of the pits real, actual significance is this. Way back in the ice age, animals and stuff used to get trapped in the tar and die (as demonstrated above by the struggling mammoth), so, heaps (that's Australian for "a lot") of fossils were recovered from the pits. And thus The Pits have been kept on display in all their smelly glory.