@ LACMA - California Design, 1930-1965: “Living in a Modern Way.” Opens 10.5.11

LACMA presents California Design, 1930-1965: “Living in a Modern Way.” The exhibition—the first major study of modern California design—examines the state’s key role in shaping the material culture of the country at mid-century. California Design features more than 350 objects in wideranging media, including furniture, textiles, fashion, graphic and industrial design, ceramics, jewelry, metalwork, architectural drawings, and film, as well as two period re-creations—most notably the living room from the home of renowned designers Charles and Ray Eames. The exhibition is organized by Wendy Kaplan, Curator and Department Head, and Bobbye Tigerman, Assistant Curator, of LACMA’s Decorative Arts and Design Department.

“Given that California became a world center for design innovation after 1945, it’s surprising that this exhibition is the first comprehensive study of the subject. While figures such as the Eameses, Richard Neutra and Rudi Gernreich are well known, we present new context for their work,” stated Wendy Kaplan. Bobbye Tigerman elaborated, “At the same time, we also introduce audiences to previously unheralded designers who played an integral role in the development of California design.”

California Design, 1930-1965: “Living in a Modern Way” is one of five exhibitions LACMA is presenting in conjunction with Pacific Standard Time, an unprecedented collaboration initiated by the Getty, bringing together more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California to tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene (beginning October 2011).

Exhibition Overview
“California is America, only more so,” the author Wallace Stegner famously declared in 1959. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the state symbolized the good life in America. After 1945 a burgeoning, newly prosperous population—intoxicated by the power to purchase after the deprivation years of the Great Depression and the wartime rationing of goods—turned the state into America’s most important center for progressive architecture and furnishings. This exhibition explores how the California of our collective imagination—a democratic utopia where a benign climate permitted life to be led informally and largely outdoors— was translated into a material culture that defined an era.

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9.27 - @ LACE - 'Los Angeles Goes Live' Performance Art in Southern California 1970-1983

Los Angeles Goes Live is an exhibition, performance series and publication project that explores the histories and legacies of performance art in Southern California in the 1970s and early 80s. It will include a broad range of materials that represent the varied material record of performance: from photographic and video documentation to scores, scripts, costumes, posters and artist books. The Los Angeles Goes Live performance series will feature re-inventions of historical performances and new per formative actions staged throughout the city.

Los Angeles Goes Live is part of Pacific Standard Time. This unprecedented collaboration, initiated by The Getty, brings together more than sixty cultural institutions from across Southern California for six months beginning October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene. LACE’s exhibition, performances and publication are supported by a generous grant from the Getty Foundation. For more information on each commissioned artist and a full description of the Los Angeles Goes Live exhibition, visit losangelesgoeslive.org

LACE invites its audiences to interrogate a central issue at the core of performance art practice and scholarship:

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TV on The Radio, Arctic Monkeys and Panda Bear @ The HOLLYWOOD BOWL Sunday 9.25 -

Close out your summer with an epic evening at the Hollywood Bowl. The final show of the season, this five-band bill showcases rock's most electrifying artists from L.A. to the U.K. The show starts early, so pack a picnic and settle in under the stars for another history-making event at the Bowl.

Radical NY Art Rock Blipsters TV ON THE RADIO meets rowdy UK indie rock Arctic Monkeys for a divine, one-night-only affair under the stars. Plus, Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox from Animal Collective) joins Sonic Boom for his only West Coast show; LA's Warpaint intrigue with dark folk jams, and lo-fi young'uns Smith Westerns open the show.

Eight things you should know about the ten songs on the new TV ON THE RADIO album, Nine Types of Light (released April 2011 by Interscope):

1. This TV On The Radio album is a lush and beautiful album that stands apart from the group’s previous work. If their other albums had shades of dystopia and distress, this album, sung by Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone, is filled with songs about longing and love.

Of the track “You,” Tunde explains, “It’s a song about the feeling you get sometimes when you’re expressing how much you care about someone but resorting to these beautiful sounding lies, [like] ‘You’re the only one I ever loved?’ It’s a terrible thing to say to someone because it’s most likely not true.”

2. Nine Types of Light is the fourth album from TV On The Radio. You will want to refer to it as the “fourth proper studio album” from TV On The Radio; those albums were preceded by an EP titled Young Liars and an 18-track handmade CD called OK Calculator that was “released” by being hidden in random sofa cushions of New York coffee shops. Enhancing nearly every aspect of their Shortlist Prize-winning Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, 2006’s Return to Cookie Mountain was released to crazy universal acclaim.

Nine Types of Light is the follow-up to the band’s gorgeous, glorious 2008 release, Dear Science, which proved to be its breakout release. Dear Science’s widespread success did not prevent anyone from referring to TV On The Radio as a “Brooklyn band.” That is not a bad thing; the group – Tunde Adebimpe, Kyp Malone, Dave Sitek, Jaleel Bunton, and the late Gerard Smith – is indeed from Brooklyn.

3. But sometimes it’s ok to leave. The band recorded Nine Types of Light in Los Angeles, the first time they recorded outside of Brooklyn. In 2010, the group’s multi-instrumentalist, producer, and sometimes beat-boxer Dave Sitek moved to Los Angeles because that’s where the money he wanted a change of scenery. Nine Types of Light was recorded at his home studio.

4. TV On The Radio do not write traditional pop songs. Often, they change direction two or three times in one song. Distorted guitars, sauntering and reverberating bass, TVOTR tunes are just-barely containing an explosive amount of energy underneath itself – and that tension is nothing less than thrilling. On this album, the group takes an admittedly simpler approach to some of their songs. “I think the songs on this album, to me, maybe sound simpler,” Tunde says. “But it just might be that we have gotten better at what we do.”

5. Nine Types of Light might sound like a peculiar name for an album. Perhaps a reference to a core scientific principle on the refraction of sunlight. Or a grand ideology of film or photography techniques. But the album title actually isn’t a reference to anything specific, the band says. It holds no cryptic meaning. “It’s something that kept circling around in my head,” Tunde says. “It struck me as odd that that phrase, when you keep it to just nine types of light, it’s excluding a billion other types of light. I like how it’s a little slippery.”

6. There is a cycle that a band goes through with each release that involves recording an album, releasing it, and then touring behind it. For a group like TV On The Radio with a loyal and growing fan-base, that cycle can last about two years, which is an awful lot of time to spend with people in a highly-creative environment. “After the last show (for Dear Science), I just wanted to do anything that wasn’t this,” Tunde explains. “It was such an intense experience – not bad or good necessarily, just intense.” According to Gerard Smith, “It allows us to do the other things we want to do, or to just decompress, and then come back to the band with some focus.”

7. As celebrated and wonderful as TV On The Radio is, the entity is not enough to contain the entire creative thirst of its members. In between albums, Tunde and Gerard wrote and composed music for The Lottery, a documentary that looks at public education through the eyes of Harlem’s Success Academy annual intake lottery. Gerard spent time making music on his own and producing new music from the NYC-based Midnight Masses. Jaleel moved out from behind the drums to playing guitar again, his first instrument. He also played in the blues and gospel band Reverend Vince Anderson & His Love Choir. Dave Sitek released his own solo album, Maximum Balloon, and recently announced he would be producing and playing bass on the new album from Jane’s Addiction. Kyp released his solo album under the name Rain Machine and embarked on a couple of brief tours.

8. TV On The Radio embarked on an extensive tour beginning just before the release of Nine Types of Light. They headlined Radio City Music Hall in New York on April 13, the day after the album’s release.

TV on the Radio
Arctic Monkeys
Panda Bear
Warpaint
Smith Westerns (6p)



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Spoken Word @ REDCAT - Jack Halberstam, Wayne Koestenbaum and Maggie Nelson: "Ugly Feelings" -10.16.11

Threading a fine line between enlightenment and titillation, critical inquiry and tragic comedy, recognition and denial, three formidable cultural critics face up to the darker realms of human emotion as they read from their newly published books, inviting us to examine, name, and even revel in the “ugly feelings” that fuel the culture of our time. In Jack Halberstam’s embrace of “low theory” in The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press), the scholar looks at, among other things, the notion of failure embedded in today’s animation for children. Wayne Koestenbaum’s Humiliation (Picador) examines the guises and meanings of shame for individuals both famous and obscure—not least himself. Finally, Maggie Nelson, in The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (W.W. Norton and Co.), considers representations of violence in art, writing and drama in works expressly designed to shock and awe. But fear not: It’s still a book party!

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9.11 @ The HOLLYWOOD BOWL -The National, Neko Case with special guest T Bone Burnett and Sharon Van Etten.

THE NATIONAL consists of vocalist Matt Berninger fronting two pairs of brothers: Aaron (guitar, bass, piano) and Bryce Dessner (guitar), and Scott (bass, guitar) and Bryan Devendorf (drums). Their first full-lengths, The National and Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers, and a crucial mini-album, Cherry Tree, preceded their signing to Beggars Banquet in 2004. Alligator (2005), included underground anthem “Mr. November,” and raised their profile as the National grew into an incendiary live band. Boxer (2007), featuring songs like “Fake Empire”, “Mistaken For Strangers” and “Start A War,” sold over three times as many copies as its predecessor and saw them transformed from underground stars into an indie rock institution: they began the album cycle opening for the Arcade Fire and with guest appearances on major television shows such as the Late Show with David Letterman. By the time their busy season in support of Boxer came to a close they had become a headline attraction in their own right — REM picked them as a crucial part of a US arena tour; and the Barack Obama campaign turned “Fake Empire” into an unstated anthem for his presidential run, using it in the soundtrack to the promotional video Signs Of Hope And Change, and as background music during his victory rally in Chicago’s Grant Park.


As the first decade of the 21st century came to a close both Boxer and Alligator made countless “album of the decade” lists and their members began to occupy a still larger cultural footprint. In the period between Boxer and High Violet, Aaron and Bryce produced 2009’s Dark Was The Night, a 31-track album to benefit the Red Hot Organization. Featuring contributions from Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, Grizzly Bear, Yeasayer, and many others, the record has raised close to $1,000,000 for numerous AIDS-related charities, including an emergency grant of $150,000 to Haiti’s Partners In Health after that country’s calamitous earthquake. A related Radio City Music Hall concert quickly sold out and found The National performing alongside David Byrne, Dirty Projectors, Feist, and Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings. Next, the Brooklyn Academy Of Music commissioned the brothers to write and perform a 70-minute through-composed song cycle at the Howard Gilman Opera House, accompanying a film by visual artist Matthew Ritchie. The piece – titled The Long Count – was performed by a bespoke orchestra and sung by Matt Berninger, Kim and Kelley Deal (Breeders, Pixies) and Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond). More recently, in March 2010, Bryce’s Music Now event, a boutique festival in the band’s hometown, Cincinnati, Ohio, celebrated its fifth anniversary, and he co-curated the second annual Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. Anticipation for The National’s next move has grown to a fever pitch.

There's a special challenge to being an artist in this increasingly fractured cultural age; a delicate balancing act, between being of your time, and striving for timelessness. Few contemporary artists even try. NEKO CASE is an exception.

Case's last album, 2006's Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, brought her to that nexus where critical acclaim meets commercial success. But Case's impact can't be measured merely in chart placements or press plaudits. It's her ability to connect - on an uncommonly deep and meaningful level - with her audience. She's one those artists, you see: the kind whose songs linger in your head, your heart and soul long after the record has stopped spinning.While Case's creative evolution has made for an impressive story so far, she's about to write the most remarkable chapter in that continuing saga with the release of her sixth studio album, Middle Cyclone.The tornado that blows through the title and several songs on Middle Cyclone is an apt metaphor. Neko has famously taken her own twisted route, lighting for a time in the South, in the West, in the Northwest, in Canada, flirting with as many musical styles as homes. She is settled-or unsettled-in Tucson for the moment, with dreams of moving fulltime to the former dairy farm she owns in Vermont. She recorded the new album in both locations, as well as studios in Toronto and Brooklyn.

For Case, the beauty of making music, of creating, is that it remains a mysterious, confounding and, occasionally, contradictory process. "When I toured for Fox Confessor one of the things I said in interviews about that record was that I don't like writing love songs, that I can't write them," she recalls. "Of course, as soon as I said that, I ended up writing a bunch of love songs."

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Don't Sleep! - KAWS “Hold The Line" @ HONOR FRASER - Opening Reception 9.10.

Honor Fraser is pleased to present “Hold The Line,” KAWS’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In a new group of paintings and sculpture, Brooklyn-based artist KAWS delivers stylized adaptations of visual icons in American animation. Along with the existential emotive and psychotropic narrative avenues KAWS opens up for his altered versions of iconic animated characters, the artist’s works also provide the viewer with a richly rewarding and expansive formal consideration. Non-naturalistic color takes on new meaning in the case where there is no living, breathing, original referent for characters born of cell animation (such as SpongeBob SquarePants).

Nevertheless, the unconventional palette in KAWS’s paintings–from high impact contrasts to monochromatic use of fluorescents, primaries, and darker tones–simultaneously defamiliarizes the ubiquitous characters while accentuating the reductive geometric play that abounds in their volumes and surfaces.

“Hold The Line” opens September 10, 2011 at Honor Fraser Gallery on La Cienega Ave.

Honor Fraser Gallery
2622 S. La Cienega Blvd.
90034

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Sunday 9.4.@ The Hollywood Bowl - Movie Night with AFI and Alex Trebek.

The American Film Institute reunites with the Hollywood Bowl for a world premiere event! Alex Trebek hosts this one-of-a-kind Movie Night, testing your film and music knowledge with a feast of the greatest American films from every genre and decade. Questions will be answered live by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, while the classic film clips are projected on the big screen.

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