Sawdust City Premiere

Sawdust City tells the story of a posse of drunken reprobates who get all jiggy with the erotic dancing and the Mr. Bubble up in the Standard Hotel... oh wait, no, that was the after-afterparty. See below.

Sawdust City is actually a brilliant tragicomic holiday road movie from Wisconsin-bred Angeleno writer/director/actor David Nordstrom that premiered last night at the LA Film Festival, and will screen two more times -- Thursday, Jun 23rd 10:00pm at the Downtown Independent, and Friday, Jun 24th 3:50pm at Regal Cinemas L.A. LIVE 10. Click here for tickets and more info. Don't pass up this opportunity to climb on board the Small Form juggernaut!

Further descriptive text TK.

It is Begun...

New Work by Hector Romero

A selection of remarkable recent works on paper by extraordinary Brooklyn painter/drawer Hector Romero, who may be with us in LA soon. Hector's been mining this rich vein of abstraction melding into cartoonish figurative graphics and back again since we were in grad school at UCLA, and the whole Providence-centered flurry of similar work came and went without anyone picking up on this masterful strain. Now is the time! (PS - I uploaded these images larger than usual because of the amount of detail in them -- click on each one to get a larger view)

To the Limit, Silly Phase, Now Who's Crazy, Nemo, Miracles, Las Palmas, Favorite Part, Fat Lip, Early Raveen, Cult Favorites, 6 valves All works pencil or mixed media on paper, 2010

Canine Freestyle Scratchin'

To compensate for my lack of critical blogging over the course of the Spring Semester, I have posted my 3rd video to youtube -- a delightful funny animal number that will undoubtedly be the ground zero of one or more paradigm-shattering human/canine sound art collaborations. Thank you for your support.

The crowd is swelling, but there's still plenty of bacon...

Carol Cheh said I should be live blogging instead of working on my Art History Powerpoint, so...

Teenage Wasteland Party Shoot

Made it out to E 150th street off the Pearlblossom outside Palmdale last night to partake of some small form simulacral party action for the much-anticipated follow up to Mike Ott's Littlerock. And boy howdy let me tell you if fake parties aren't just as good if not better than the real thing!

Lee Lynch and Cory Zacharia in some ill-defined hostage situation. Nobody was clear about what was going on but Walter seems to approve. And it seemed to get Cory's thespian juices stirring.

Dave Nordstrom (who's Sawdust City debuts at the 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival between June 16 - 26) kept a tight rein on things from his luxurious production offices.

Scary Cory. Unfortunately, the filmmakers didn't get any of Walter's extended whipped-cream antics in the can, so this image will have to stand as the historical documentation. There was so much more though. So much more...

FREE PANCAKES AND BACON! (with attendance of panel discussion)

This Sunday May 22 at the Beacon Arts Building (808 N. La Brea Avenue Inglewood, California 90302) from 1 -4 PM, there will be pancakes!

Plus sausage and bacon, coffee. Courtesy IHOP. This is not a Put-On!

Plus at some point an ARATALAND! panel discussion with me, Arata, Pagel, Mat Gleason, Carol Cheh,and Shana Nys Dambrot (if she can hobble down)... and YOU! I think it's set for 3 - that's what it said on the invite - but there's been talk of moving it up so people can still get to the COLA show after. Check back here or on facebook.

UPDATE: Looks like we'll start at 2, but keep yakking for the stragglers, for as long as any of us can stand it. OK, my top ten Pere Ubu songs...

Don't miss this last chance to see this historic show! Here's what the critics have been saying:

Rainbow larvae. Hello Kitty bombs. Secret pine cone messages. Such inspired madness may sound like the contents of a precocious and/or demented child’s toy box but in fact, they're the building blocks of Arataland!, the “mid-career survey of artworks by Mount Washington's Michael Arata:" a description that, while factually accurate, can’t begin to convey Arata’s mix of the playful and the disconcerting; the observational and the interactive.

Read the rest of Kim Axelrod Ohanneson's review/interview here


In the 32,400 feet square art space that used to be used for storage is a massive collection of Arata’s works, some that have been previously seen and excitingly, those that have never been displayed in public. Expanding over the space of three floors in the four-story building, the exhibition has many installations that guests can ponder over as well as play with. Composed of small to large-scale installations, the show ignites a youthful energy in the viewer with its bright pop colors and whimsical forms.

Read the rest of Cindy Kyungah Lee's review here


Arataland! wants to be slick but can’t help itself from slipping on the proverbial banana. For Example, in Arata’s Pet Spaces photos, Arata re-creates the poses of Victoria’s Secret models as the ideals of feminine beauty, here is the catch, its Arata making the poses in the photographs. In Pet Spaces, Arata absurdly mocks his own masculinity and fascination with the Venus of our time typified by the Victoria’s Secret model. By mocking the model of beauty, Arata’s sexiness itself is nullified, that he chooses to decorate the areas of his own portraits with googly eyes is no wonder. The googly eyed negative “Pet Spaces” are as goofy as they are sad. In Arata’s own objectification he seems to turn the mirror on us. Through him we see desire as spectacle that prods us into such poses in the first place, and makes us all look a little pathetic.

Read the rest of Mary Anna Pomonis' review here


The sense of opening up that one gets upon ascending to the fourth floor mirrors the overall feeling one has while traveling through this exhibition. Arata's ideas truly bloom in these spaces, which are clean and neutral yet casual, lacking the stiff formality of a museum space. His individual works bloom as well, whether being showcased in the broad light of the fourth floor, or peeking out from unexpected corners between galleries on the second; they seem to simply live and breathe everywhere. Arata says that his artmaking process begins with a massive junk pile of ideas and material, which he stores in his mental warehouse; the ideas that are good enough to work on are then moved into his mental library. It is fitting that his finished work now finds an apt showcase in a warehouse of another kind.

Read the rest of Carol Cheh's review here

Visions of Pagan Renewal

Boy Howdy and if that weren't the hootinest hollerinest Walpurgisnacht celebration in all of Inglewood this year! By which I mean of course One Night Stand: Walpurgisnacht, a temporary subdivision of ARATALAND! consisting of a one night guerrilla show featuring 30-some artists, many of whom created unique objects or performances on the theme of pagan renewal (or something). Here, for example we see Matt Wardell installing a 10 LB APE kiosk as Steve Hurd and Young Summers look the other way in pious terror.


Brad Spence nailed his street cred with a site-specific homage to Michael Arata's Pet Space series on the advertising mural of an adjacent building.

Rebecca Ripple's Prosthetic Suburban Awning dangling ominously before a terrified and bewildered Hurd.

Electomagnetic oscillations from dueling totem poles by Don Suggs and Dani Tull created a wormhole that swept Eamonn Fox and Lee Lynch back in time and space Medieval Hibernia where they will remain trapped until they recover the lost Hexenbesen (Hibernian for "penis roomba") left there by Ross Rudel, via Mel's Hole. OK, hold on -- here's where it gets complicated...




Before and after shots of Mary Anna Pomonis' tantric alchemical performative installation.



DJ Green Light/Green Heat vogueing in front of a photo of Arata's butt. More barely-concealed masonic iconography.


Steve Hurd hurting everyone's feelings. I guess this is the kind of attitude you need to make it to the top.


The two ends of Arata's Hot Dog Exchange. Drawing theme options included Virginity, Pets, Magic, and Reproduction.




An unscheduled gymnastic performance by...? Who was this amazing kid anyway? She was doing cartwheels across the parking lot for hours!


Gypsy jazz band Meme Lateef invoking Captain Howdy (seen in window in upper left - detail following).


It is perhaps regrettable that Captain Howdy's global reign of fire will bring an end to civilization as we know it, but thanks to everyone who helped close it out on such a high note!

Get Your Art Out of the Gutter!

One would have to be a true believer in the equally far-fetched hypothetical purity of either museums or graffiti art to get really hot under the collar about Jeffrey Deitch's MOCA magnum opus "Art in the Streets." Therein lies the ambitious exhibition's weakest link: the unsustainable suspension of disbelief required to entertain this grandly operatic storyline, and its protagonists. You know the story I'm talking about, right? The one about how the stuffy repository of historically significant cultural artifacts and the scrappy band of semiotic revolutionaries established détente in order to move art history and human evolution forward into the bright, bright future.


Art historically, the most raggedy tag on the funkiest dumpster is more significant than anything MOCA or any other museum could muster at this point. In terms of bestowing legitimacy on an enterprise, the equation actually runs diametrically opposite to how it's being promoted: "Street Art" — even in the degraded illustration-school-grads-deregulating-public-space-to-establish-a-marketable-brand-identity incarnation — has far more cultural currency than the exhausted and exhausting stock rotation of the art fashion industry. I'm just sayin'.

The only thing Deitch and MOCA have to offer Street Art is that other kind of currency — the regular kind; the kind you need in order to buy spray paint. This has been the real problem and challenge of graffiti as an artform since it first leaked into high art through works by Jean Dubuffet, Helen Levitt, Jacques Villeglé, Antoni Tàpies, and others — more than half a century ago. How do you monetize and control anonymous amateur pictographic trespassing and acknowledge its potency as visual language, without undermining the proprietary fiscal monopoly of the professional art world?

Read the rest of Don't Believe the Hype here or ATJ

Images: top & bottom; Street Market by Todd James, Barry McGee, and Stephen Powers (aka REAS, TWIST, and ESPO); middle: 1992: Freight Trains

The Shopping List

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One Night Stand: Walpurgisnacht
A Subdivision of ARATALAND!
April 30th 7 PM - ?

Beacon Arts Building
808 N La Brea
Inglewood CA 90302

"Forget it, Jake, it's Magic Candletown."

“We want to call it ‘Perform! Not!’,” says Small Form Space spokesman Lee Lynch “and instead of new genres grad students, fill Chinatown with civil war re-enactors, LARPers [that’s Live Action Role Players – I had to ask too], and those superheroes and muppets that panhandle on Hollywood Blvd.”

Image: Chinatown Beautification Project guerrilla modifications to the Chinatown West Plaza Koi Pond/Wishing Well, Chung King RD, Los Angeles, Ca on March 3rd 2011

Not sure what else got edited out, or how it ended up in the Newspaper of Record (thought I was writing for the International Herald Tribuene) but you heard it here first: Chinatown Lives!

Banksy at MOCA (Silverado Omen)

"Best in Show"

This Dog was discovered in a Southern California taxidermist's freezer where it had been left uncollected for seven years. It was absolutely not killed by Bansky for the purposes of this exhibition.