Jet lagged, happy to be home. On Sunday, got lost in LA... after finding my way, I saw the Wack! show: it was amazing to see all those iconic pieces in person, after years of looking at bad B&W reproductions. I wish I had a daughter to take through the show: it is such an important collection of work and history. Days before, I had seen the Identity Theft show at the Santa Monica museum, featuring a few of the same artists with a more narrow focus, and had found the work to be flat and dry, the art seemingly lost in the didactic message.

Next, worked my way around many obstacles in the form of roadblocks, security and one way streets to see Poetics of The Handmade. The exhibition was amazing in terms of the work's sheer obsessiveness, but some pieces worked better than others in terms of reaching the status of "poetry". Marco Maggi's incised aluminum pieces are incredibly seductive... saw a few of these at the Kemper Museum last week as well. Maximo Gonzales with his entire room made of fantastic scenes fabricated completely from devalued currency cut into tiny pieces and pinned to the wall, stood out, as did Dario Escobar's ornate skateboards & surfboards. Livia Marin carved (turned?) hundreds of lipsticks, emphasizing the phallic & fetishistic nature of this common object (I could not help but think of how this piece will have to be preserved under a vitrine to survive dust). The pieces made out of QTips and toothpicks seemed tired, and not able to transcend their materials. Maybe I have been looking at too much Tara Donovan, someone who does this so well. A sample of each artist's work can be found here.
So today, unpacking, laundry, sorting through 3 trip's worth of collected information, loving on Radley, and trying to unknot my neck & back, to get into the studio tomorrow.