Chinese Cocktail re-performance, Barnsdall Art Theatre, Los Angeles 1/24/2012.
This past Tuesday at the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre, I had the rare opportunity to attend Chinese Cocktail, a re-performance/concert by Robert Wilhite. It was a special treat, part of Pacific Standard Time’s bonanza performance art festival. Chinese Cocktail had only been performed twice before, both times in 1978.
An absurdist take on music, sculpture, and performance, the arranged set of brightly painted geometric and three-dimensional objects called into question their relationships to each other in space, and our symbolic relationships with them. Add layers of instrumental complexity and you have performance rife with curiosities.
Yes, there was a shiny pink ball with handles that acted as a magnetic theremin type instrument. Yes, there’s a guitar that resembles a giant badminton shuttlecock. Yes, one musician’s sole function is to play his triangular air guitar precisely at the moments it is notated in the score. What’s not to love about a tall bow-shaped guitar painted in Memphis furniture colors? And was that a vacuum cleaner enclosed in an ultramarine box rounding up the rear?
Woohoo! My first published article on HauteLiving about the Art Los Angeles Contemporary fair.
I’d like to thank ALAC for inviting me, UCLA for honing my art criticism writing skills, Canon for my quick-shooting G11.
http://www.hauteliving.com/2012/01/art-los-angeles-contemporary-2012/
Ice fountain sculpture, ALAC, Barker Hangar, 1/19/2012
Printed Matter’s booth at Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Barker Hangar, 1/19/2012
Kids playing with double mirror plant office sculpture, Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Barker Hangar, 1/19/2012
Steve Turner’s booth at Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Barker Hangar, 1/19/2012
Judy Chicago’s Ice sculpture at Art Los Angeles Contemporary opening night, Barker Hangar, Santa Monica. 1/19/2012
Beige. The color of evil. The innocuous-seeming shade that adds up to 18 (6+6+6).
THE PRIMARY COLOR OF MY WARDROBE!
“At first blush, of course, the color beige might have all kinds of comforting associations—from oatmeal, that pabulum of wintertime childhoods, to a worn-to-softness pair of trousers. But beige is also the color of deceit and oppression. Khaki, after all, originated in mid-19th-century colonial India, where it took its name from the Urdu term for “dusty.”“
“Most people think if colors have attributes such as good or evil, that the color of evil is either the red of arterial blood gushing from a wound, or the deepest black of the darkest night sky. While these are certainly evil colors, they are not as evil as beige…. The most evil color has to appear benign.”
I’m not sure how Etienne Gros made this, but it’s brilliant. Brilliant!
Making a female contour/form with just one piece of foam and some stitching? Amazing.
