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.

Saturday, September 10, 2016

Bob Law @ Marc Selwyn


CASTLE CCCXXXV 07.05.01, 2001
Oil on canvas
29 x 40 3/4 inches


30.7.94 RBYRBY: ACBACB: Castle/27.7.94 YRB: YRB: BAC: BAC Castle/31.7.94 YBR YBR: BCA BCA Castle, 1994
Oil stick and pencil on paper
11 x 15 inches each


Landscape Drawing, 1967
Pencil on paper
10 x 14 inches




Mister Paranoia V 21.8.71, 1971
Oil on canvas
71 x 112 inches







Having just come from the recent Agnes Martin exhibition at LACMA, standards for drawing and painting were set quite high in terms of method, rigor, and investigation, especially where abstract impulses may be concerned.  Unfamiliar with the work of Bob Law (and having a really hard time separating the artist's name from Henry Winkler's character Bob Loblaw from Arrested Development), seeing this show came as some kind of comic relief as the cartoonish Comic Relief seems to depict a herm-like, character (which could be mistaken for a flash hard-drive by todays standards).  Obviously not so in either of these contemporary associations of mine, it is interesting to see these works juxtaposed against Martin's (at least as recent personal memory) and consider how similar impulses in similar eras may produce similar results even superficially as it pertains to painting as framing device for thought, and exploration of the limits of material and shape within such a form. The tension between geometric and free-from is common ground that points, in my mind, to the irreconcilable sublime between upright figure and expanding field, as also deceptively simply body and mind.

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