Noah Purifoy "Junk Dada" @ Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Untitled (Bed Headboard), 1958

Construction

Law and Order, 1965

Plexiglas assemblage

The Door, 1988

Construction

Charisma, 1989

Combine

Urban Sprawl, 1989

Construction

Zulu, 1989

Construction

Hanging Tree, 1990

Mixed media

Picket Fence, 1993

Mixed media

Four Horseman, 1993

Mixed media

Sir Watts II, 1996

Assemblage sculpture

Untitled (Radiator Pink and Yellow), 1998

Assemblage

Not quite sure how I was going to post these images in terms of sequences (my stream of consciousness viewing experience or a more stream-lined chronology), I have opted for the latter, which is not very often, if ever, the case for my interests with this blog. However, something about temporal sequence seemed worthwhile in order to contextualize Purifoy's work within a larger art historical framework, one I had, alas, only begun to know during the Hammer Museum's Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 exhibition of 2011-2012 (see here for my one and only image; see here for the Hammer's coverage).  

To further complicate matters in my recent viewing of this exhibition regarding the sculpture below, I neglected to get a title and date. So, if anyone can help in this matter, please comment or contact me directly.  Disclaimers aside (and there's a lot more that I would like to say about the work and its context), for now please let the images and the details carry the weight of this posting. Thanks and enjoy Purifoy!

Matt Wedel "rock" @ LA Louver

rock, 2010

fired clay and glaze

36 x 38 x 37 inches

David Hockney "Painting and Photography" @ LA Louver

Perspective Should Be Reversed, 2014

Photographic drawing printed on paper, mounted on Dibond

44 1/8 x 70 7/8 x 2 1/2 inches

Sparer Chairs, 2014

Photographic drawing printed on paper, mounted in Dibond

44 x 70 7/8 x 2 1/2

Multiplicity. Art historical referents. Perspective should be perversed. Flatness. Synthesis of photo and painting. Self-referential. Likenesses and double-takes. Pictures in pictures. Pictorial space sutures space of presentation. Cards (chance). Scrabble (language; ordering of letters). Portraiture. Scenes of everyday life stripped to the essentials of the activity. Leisure games. Painting portraits as leisure games. Art=game. Approaching movement, motion, and next step late in ones career.

At some point in the viewing process of these works, I stopped tracking titles of individual works and began to enjoy the complexity between painting, photography, and my own complicity taking photographs myself, while looking, while others were looking (naked eye/camera as well), and it all seemed a wonderful dissolution as it reflected on Hockney's career, one primarily of portraiture as it relates to technologies past and present.  The message just might be that art can be seriously fun. To wit, the following two photos captured two different moments within the viewing context of the exhibition.

In this last image, I wish I could have captured this group of three males earlier when I had the chance. From their resemblances and interactions throughout the show, I surmised that they were more than likely three-generations along the same line. Somehow their presence struck me within the context of the show, not just for personal reasons, but more importantly, as these David Hockney painting/photo works delineate and reflect similar themes regarding generation, iteration, and repositioning (all subsuming concepts of passing time). Somehow this integration of art and life seemed particularly poignant.  Though I missed the chance to make my point clear with a photograph, there was still great amusement while four dudes descended this staircase.