MOCA is getting itself a rock that’s bigger and heavier than anyone else’s rock, LA Weekly reported yesterday. The project is a “collaboration” with a corporate entity which is handling the selection of the rock and all of the details around the presentation of the rock. MOCA’s involvement is limited to a James Franco performance on the rock. There is no word on whether the bigger, heavier rock is resulting in further delays to MOCA’s earth art show, but a MOCA spokesman told MAN yesterday that if the earth art show was postponed again, it would have nothing to do with the bigger, heavier rock, no, nothing at all.- Sebastian Smee is the latest critic to gush over the Orange County Museum of Art-organized “Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series.” Some background on some of Smee’s references: Diebenkorn, Notre Dame and Ocean Park No. 38 (and its related drawing); the somewhat-enabling impact of air travel over Bureau of Reclamation projects in the West on the Ocean Park series and the influence of Willem de Kooning.
- Side note: It’s no longer extraordinary for major exhibitions to not travel to New York or the northeast, but that this one isn’t is… really, really odd.
- MoMA’s show on the manufactured or deconstructed figure needs, er, re-figuring writes Karen Rosenberg in the NYT. Fortunately for you, she avoids similarly atrocious puns.
- From Frieze, ten remembrances of Mike Kelley.
- In the NYT’s Sunday opinion section, Mary Ellen Mark on prom night.
- In the LAT, David Pagel loves Frederick Hammersley at LA Louver. I bet I would too. [Image above: Hammersley, Expand upon #11, 1987.]
- At the Met, a minor exhibition on the nude in photography. In the New York Times, Roberta Smith responds with a smart and major write-up.
On this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast: Lari Pittman discusses politics, violence, biography and how they all feed into his remarkable paintings. In the second segment, Crown Point Press founder Kathan Brown tells us about working with Richard Diebenkorn. Download the program, subscribe via iTunes, subscribe via RSS and/or view images of art discussed on the show.
April 2, 2012, 7:38 am
Another influence on Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings might be the large transom windows in his studio that, when opened, form diagonals. I remember them when I visited Charles Garabedian’s studio which used to be right across the hall from Diebenkorn.
Definitely. And there’s a photograph of one of those windows in the exhibition catalogue!