In Honor of Punk 2

Nearly all galleries had openings in Culver City this past Saturday with a few highlights like Honor Fraser's punk manifesto, a pretty cool Gesamtkunstwerk of posters, flyers and other ephemera assembled by artist and erstwhile punk, Toby Mott.

 
Press release:
Ephemeral and throwaway as each of these objects were, collected together they tell, in uniquely immediate and visual terms, a part of the history of Britain, the history of ideas, and the history of art. Punk has always exerted a fascination, but perhaps never stronger than at this moment. The legacy of punk has permeated modern culture and society, and its visual vocabulary infuses much contemporary art, while the punk spirit resonates in particular with the anti-elitist, DIY ethos of today’s young, blogging artists and musicians. This exhibition recalls the anarchic spirit of authenticity and amateurism, the volatile and ambiguous celebration of negativity, creativity, violence and protest that was Punk.
 

Shepard Fairey mingled, I see him often on openings lately... Real punks didn't show up, just a dog with a grim chin.

   

On we went and swallowed a few really boring l'art pour l'art shows, jeez, what are they thinking? I guess they didn't. I can't be impressed by glow in the dark ropes or copulating flesh, nor do I find photographs of word puzzles appealing which need five pages of intellectual blabla to explain why they are supposed to be cool. The image has to speak, scream, whisper or yodel for itself otherwise it's like those annoying amateur movies where images just seem to be illustrations for massive dialogue.

 

 Lost in the white open spaces...

Kopeikin showed some fantastic extraterrestrial works from Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick.

Look at this, one lady says to the other. He has wings... You know it's on Mars? asks the fellow on the left.  Really? How do you know? Opened a bar there, he answers. Called: Blastaway... and disappears before I could get his card.

Cuba TV by Simone Lueck and Jeffrey Milstein's Cuba on the streets were totally worth wandering around for... Thinkspace, who rarely disappoints my slightly art snob taste, (I get impatient sometimes after the experience of searching for convincing new talent for my own gallery for a couple years) was the winner of red dots, Tran Nguyen's work was nearly sold out.

A skinny man in a bright and shiny silver shirt slithered into Blum and Poe, where a group show called Glee "is imbued in an atmosphere of joyful madness". We found the selected works neither "blissful nor seductive" as described by the gallery but felt the "incumbent sense of tragedy" when the silver man was sucked in by the "joyful madness" and loudly laughed at the pictures, before he, nimble on his feet like a Fred Astaire, disappeared in the crowd, the crazy laughter still hanging in the air... If he was staged this was good, really good...