dayoutlast: July 2013

dayoutlast is a record of my direct engagement with mostly contemporary art, mostly Los Angelean.

As this blog has evolved since its 2010 inception, so has my perspective. What I once perceived as central within the investigation was what was central, literally, within the photographic frame that I shared here. While still an important consideration, such thinking has also given way to more peripheral considerations, ones also accompanied occasionally by text (written manifestation of thought) and the oscillations between them. What's missing here are larger unknowns surrounding issues of presentation and representation; the amount of time and space it actually takes to accomplish such first-hand observations; and the quandaries between documentation and interpretation.

Despite my attempt to communicate here with image and text what is essential in some respect about the artwork, neither representation should ever be considered a substitution for the primary viewing experience. Of course, occasionally there are exceptions.

Most of the time, these posts are merely remnants---residual fragments---from my last day out.

--Justin Lowman

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Brian O'Connell @ Redling Fine Art

James Turrell "Sooner Than Later, Roden Crater" @ Kayne Corcoran and Griffin

Obviously not meant to be a "Turrell" show as we know it from his phenomenological light works, the sort of "behind the scenes" open studio feel that pervades this presentation of models, artifacts, and references is at least interesting in the most didactic ways. So, an emphasis on ocular volume and contours of space to suggest as much seems clear, that is to say layers build over time to produce the experience. Not quite sure what else to say (and perhaps there isn't much more really), the instruments, in particular, leave an air of appearances that I'm not quite sure what to make of or care about...

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Paul Gillis @ Post

Urs Fischer @ MOCA LA, Grand

Whitewash over black ground brings back memories. I'm thinking about my own Collapse paintings of 2007-2008. I get it. Light over dark. Bright fluid=light=stream of consciousness fragments. There is no end; the whole does not unify. Edges (transitional spaces) are unruly at best.

This show literalizes as much but perhaps too vapidly as patrons wander and mill about snapping photos in a kind of feeding frenzy as if he/she is getting it, (as if I am getting it)!

What lies beneath is unsubstantial (structure) as ephemeral as surface. The body, building both metaphors (oil and water, which one's which) for one another. Butter, cheese, and honey...(words overheard, blurted in the viewing context)! Female beauty; destructive male tendencies. Cliches all! Where will all these snapshots go? The entropic repository of Alexandria or Babel?

Photogenic show or contemporary obsession? They are not to be looked at, to be regarded; they are to be recorded, to be seen by and for a machine. I, too, am complicit in this moment. Commodities and objects, illusions all. Absence of a body from a warped bed. No rest. Everything is everything. This too shall pass. Objects of genericized dimension, Platonic conventions. Male objects; female bed. Not Rauschenberg.

Suspended spectacle (the raindrops, of course). Not Eliasson "Beauty." Eroded interiors; smudged exteriors. Naughty ploys of privilege. Eaten roofs and slanted drips. SyFy. Light and shadow. Cloo. Kloo.

Bread. Expanded foam. Tim Burton. Chris Burden. Beasts of burden (Cattelan). Weight of every move must be lifted (elevated?) in order to flow effortlessly. Light as bell. Throat suspension. What is real? Rocks?

A general confusion and malaise, a specific meditation on the destructive tendencies of time, fluids not contained. Wait, I think I see Paul McCarthy. I could have sworn that was...