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.

Friday, July 8, 2016

Joshua Aster "So I Went to a Place" @ LA >< ART














So many interesting paintings to look at in this show, it was an overwhelming reminder of the infinitude of  abstract painting (certainly a strand of its history), which is to say one marked more by process than product.  To consider these works on formal terms alone would be to be lost for days in a labyrinth, one I'm assuming the artist knows well.  How it corresponds to the current proliferation and access of information and images seems clear, especially as certain works bend toward a more digital structure in the marks and the structure; certainly the installation reinforces this notion.

Because the paintings were not all available for intimate viewing (consider the ones in the upper rows, way out of reach), I began to think about the grouping as a whole installation rather than  discrete, individual parts, in which case I was left with more questions than answers, which might actually be a good thing, again a process, inquiry, and not so much a statement/argument here.  All of that side, such a gridded layout of works lends itself to the features of a printed page or possibly a film sequence (a series of evolving images), again because many paintings were inaccessible; there were a few I would have liked to have seen closer,  if only in a book or a slideshow, which seems also to suggest a reason to memorialize such a body of work.

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