Dennis Hollingsworth

War Paint

Jacques is laying down an analysis and a challenge that predicts an immanent, epochal sea change... and he's writing like his life depends on it.

Which is to say that he deserves our time and perhaps a reply.

Which is what I think I'll do.

A little later.

Peter Frank, LAWeekly Art Pick

Peter Frank is a real gent:

For all their contemplative tidiness, Blum and Kerwin paint richly and sexily. So does Dennis Hollingsworth, but without the good manners. Hollingsworth has covered his huge canvases with a wealth of oil pigments, bubbling and cascading as if spilling from a volcano or geyser. Clots and rivulets of bright, contrasting color run up against one another, somehow never getting muddy. Hollingsworth?s lava comes from the rainbow. There is something else, however, that makes these effulgences seem so much more reasoned, so much more visually and intellectually substantive, than the faux-ab-ex vomitoria they might pretend to be: Every stream and globule maintains its discrete presence, holds its own in the painterly stew. Hollingsworth is not mucking about; he?s actually composing his eruptions, emulating the sense as well as the force of nature.

Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., L.A.; Tues.-Fri., 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; thru May 31. (323) 658-8088.

I found a succinct bio on Peter:

About the Author

Peter Frank is an art historian and art critic who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in art history at Columbia University. He was art critic of New York?s Soho Weekly News and later served as chief art critic of The Village Voice. In 1981, he was curator of the Exxon Biennial exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, and he has been a curator for Dokumenta in Kassel, Germany. In 1988, he moved to Los Angeles, where he is now editor of Visions magazine and a regular contributor to L.A. Weekly. He is a vice president of the International Association of Art (AICA) critics, and he helped to organize the 1991 international AICA conference in Los Angeles.

Mr. Frank has written several books and many catalogues. His recent books include New, Used and Improved for Abbeville Press, an exploration of the experimental art scene on New York?s Lower East Side and Something Else Press: an Annotated Bibliography for McPherson & Company, the definitive study on Dick Higgins?s Fluxus-based publishing house.

Peter Frank has written extensively on intermedia and Fluxus artists. In 1985, he edited Ken Friedman: Events for Jaap Rietmann, Inc., a comprehensive collection of Friedman?s proposal pieces.

The Cool School

Jean Milant shook me out of my studio monomania (...man, this week, this month is CRAZY busy...) to go downtown to see The Cool School with Todd Hebert (a sharp painter who recently moved to upstate New York from LA).

As the movie ran, I liked it so much that I had to flip out my camera and catch a 5 minute clip to give you all a taste of what the movie was like. It felt so bootleggy... MY BAD!! I uploaded it onto YouTube in the spirit of promoting the movie, and I hope that I didn't cross a line doing this.

Fingers crossed.

Anyway, it's a must see movie, especially for us LA based/ LA bred artists out there.

25/10

Last weekend was our anniversary, Stephanie and I.

We met in undergraduate school. Old friend Mark Macy and I were shooting video whilst researching an architecture studio project, my eye caught her in the lens of the video camera. Editing the footage, I kept scrolling back over her image. Then I saw her on the way to studio, she was attending business school in an adjacent building. I noted her routine and intercepted her one day on the way to class. That was 25 years ago. The foto above was shot on our first date. 1983.

Here's a few more shots through the decade of the 80's:

1985. We were babies.

1987. Babies. Weren't we all?

And the 25/10? 25 years together, 10 years married. Why the 15 year lag time? Both of our families were divorced... we thought that there was something more powerful than a marriage vow that kept people together. Or better put: there must have been something that made the marriage vow more powerful to keep a couple together. It's hard to put a finger on what it was, other than to look in the eyes and say yes simultaneously.

And keep saying yes.

For eternity.

PruessPress:

I'm very happy and honored to be included in Joel Mesler's all-star team.
That's a context on steroids.

From the press release:

RENTAL is proud to present the first large-scale exhibition of the works of PRUESSPRESS, a bi-costal producer of limited edition artist prints.

On View: June 14 ? July 12, 2008
Preview: June 14, 7-9PM

Ahora

Painting

Blood of Tyrants and Patriots

As Memorial Day comes to a close, here is a video that I found and lost and found again. I know little about the author, clicking around the links didn't yield too much info for me.

Two more items:

The Macho Response is a site run by a musician here in Los Angeles who calls himself "The Crack Emcee". He has been at war with cults of many forms, and he is both funny and relentless as he chips away at groupthink in his blog. Like myself he is completely immersed in the arts and like myself he was once enlisted in the Navy... perhaps at the same time frame.

This is a strange combination that sets us apart in ways that are both alienating and illuminating. You see, for most of our people in our respective creative communities, the military is either a null set or an object of ridicule... a legacy of of the Vietnam era, I suppose. Sad. It's a strange response, this alienation from the military experience in the realm of the cultural leading edge. In the previous epoch, such background was unexceptional that and artist might have been a soldier/sailor/airman. Beckmann. Rauschenberg. The entire Western worldview, the very nature of art itself as it is manifested in universities and museums and galleries that drive and are driven by them, pivots from freedom's fulcrum. The idea that --from time to time, freedom has to be defended and fought for-- doesn't spring easily to the mind of most cultural sophisticates.

Here's an illustration:

"The Crack Emcee" occasionally visually elaborates text from selected online articles, this one from the Telegraph by Andrew Glimson, a snippet:

...Thomas Jefferson warned that the tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots. To the Americans, the idea that freedom and democracy exact a cost in blood is second nature.

We stood at Gettysburg, scene of the bloodiest battle of all, on a field covered with memorials to the fallen. Here Abraham Lincoln gave his great and sublimely brief address, ending with the hope "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth".

Again some Europeans will give an unkind smile. All this sounds so Puritan, so na?ve and so self-righteous. We cannot help feeling that the Americans ought to have been able to settle their quarrel without killing each other, and, while we cannot defend the institution of slavery, we wonder whether the North had the right to impose its will by force.

These are vain quibbles. The North went to war and was victorious.

The Americans are prepared to use force in pursuit of what they regard as noble aims. It is yet another respect in which they are rather old-fashioned. They are patriots who venerate their nation and their flag.

The idea has somehow gained currency in Britain that America is an essentially peaceful nation. Quite how this notion took root, I do not know. Perhaps we were unduly impressed by the protesters against the Vietnam war.

It is an idea that cannot survive a visit to the National Museum of American History in Washington, where one is informed that the "price of freedom" is over and over again paid in blood.

The Americans' tactics in Iraq, and their sanction for Israel's tactics in Lebanon, have given rise to astonishment and anger in Europe. It may well be that those tactics are counter-productive, and that the Americans and Israelis need to take a different approach to these ventures if they are ever to have any hope of winning hearts and minds.

But when the Americans speak of freedom, we should not imagine, in our cynical and worldly-wise way, that they are merely using that word as a cloak for realpolitik. They are not above realpolitik, but they also mean what they say.

These formidable people think freedom is so valuable that it is worth dying for.

One would think the intelligencia on both sides of the Atlantic could easily grasp this.

Painting

Memorial Day

Memorial Day, 2008.

My father was one of a handful of troops sent into the Pusan Perimeter to stop the North Korean invasion. The conquest of Pusan would have decided the war in favor of the North Korea. On July 28th, 1950, his unit was surrounded and wiped out by North Korean forces. Amateur historian Ed Evanhoe wrote:

Meanwhile, "B" and "D" Companies, 29th Infantry were under attack by superior enemy forces at Anui. They tried to withdraw to high ground
across the Nam River but only 2 officers and 16 men made it before North
Korean troops slammed the exit door. The remainder of the two units
engaged in street fighting until around midnight and then, those who could,
slipped into the hills and tried to walk to safety. Approximately half of
the two companies were either killed or missing in this battle.

Wikipedia:

By August, the South Korean forces and the U.S. Eighth Army under General Walton Walker had been driven back into a small area in the southeast corner of the Korean peninsula around the city of Pusan. As the North Koreans advanced, they rounded up and killed civil servants. On August 20, MacArthur sent a message warning Kim Il Sung that he would be held responsible for further atrocities committed against UN troops.

By September, only the area around Pusan ? about 10 percent of the Korean peninsula ? was still in coalition hands. With the aid of massive American supplies, air support, and additional reinforcements, the UN forces managed to stabilize a line along the Nakdong River. This desperate holding action became known in the United States as the Pusan Perimeter.
Escalation of the Korean war

In the face of fierce North Korean attacks, the allied defense became a desperate battle called the Battle of Pusan Perimeter by Americans.

This is the instruction of Lieutenant General Walton Walker to 25th Division staff, July 29, 1950:

General [Douglas] MacArthur was over here two days ago; he is thoroughly conversant with the situation. He knows where we are and what we have to fight with. He knows our needs and where the enemy is hitting the hardest. General MacArthur is doing everything possible to send reinforcements. A Marine unit and two regiments are expected in the next few days to reinforce us. Additional units are being sent over as quickly as possible. We are fighting a battle against time. There will be no more retreating, withdrawal, or readjustment of the lines or any other term you choose. There is no line behind us to which we can retreat. Every unit must counterattack to keep the enemy in a state of confusion and off balance. There will be no Dunkirk, there will be no Bataan. A retreat to Pusan would be one of the greatest butcheries in history. We must fight until the end. Capture by these people is worse than death itself. We will fight as a team. If some of us must die, we will die fighting together. Any man who gives ground may be responsible for the death of thousands of his comrades.

I want you to put this out to all the men in the Division. I want everybody to understand we are going to hold this line. We are going to win.

Later in my father's life, he quietly bore scars from the war, PTSD. He lost sight of the value of his sacrifice for the South Korean people. He didn't get to see the thriving Korean community in Los Angeles, he didn't quite grasp that there were generations of happy, thriving families that owed their good fortune to the United States and other foreign powers intervened with UN approval (hard for me to imagine a similar collaboration today).

I miss him a great deal.

Jupiter

(Link.)

(Emphasis Mine)

1.

Just two days after August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina smashed into New Orleans, architectural wunderkind Daniel Libeskind was already overflowing with ideas about how to restore the city. Libeskind?he of the 1,776-foot ?Freedom Tower? for New York?s Ground Zero?compared New Orleans with postwar Berlin, which had ?in a daring way developed . . . into the 21st century.? As for a ?theme? for a rebuilt New Orleans, Libeskind mused to the New York Times, ?What could be more creative than jazz??

Mercifully, New Orleans isn?t erecting any saxophone-shaped skyscrapers as it recovers from the hurricane, which left 80 percent of its surface area?a swath seven times Manhattan?s size?inundated with floodwaters and drove nearly all of the city?s 455,000 residents from their homes. New Orleans has rebounded remarkably since then. As of January, it boasted 302,000 residents, with 2,000 more returning each month, according to data crunchers at GCR & Associates, an information-systems firm. (In early 2006, the city?s official planners had figured that just 247,000 people would be home by September 2008.)

New Orleanians have achieved much of this success by doing what New Yorkers couldn?t do after 9/11: ignoring the potentates and eggheads hankering to turn devastation into conceptual art. They?ve been building and rebuilding on their own or with small-scale help, rather than under top-down decree?and, in the process, showing that thousands of individual planners are better than one master.

1776 floors?

Libeskind blows chunks. What a crying shame for NYC.

2.

?What will China?s geopolitical role be in the future?? asked a third tourist, who looked smug about coming up with such a BBC interview of a question, albeit posed to a 29-year-old chemical engineer.

?In the long run, a very neutral role,? David said. ?China tries to be as humble as possible. There is the Taiwan issue and the Tibet issue, both handled very well by the government. But all these issues are basically economic concerns. If China?s economy climbs, all these problems will disappear.?

?I was thinking,? said the DIY haircut woman to a stateroom of people who wished she?d quit, ?that there are some world problems that need handling by China, such as global warming.?

?We want to have more friend,? David said.

?But what about global warming?? the woman said.

?We just want to be loved,? David said and looked at his watch and announced with relief that time was up.




Between the monument and the Big Hall in Chongqing was a square almost as expansive as Tiananmen in Beijing. When Mai and I were back in Hong Kong, I mentioned to Tom that the whole time we?d been on the mainland I?d hardly heard the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 mentioned.

?That?s no surprise,? Tom said. ?Tiananmen Square is where the abdication of the last emperor was proclaimed in 1912. It?s where the student demonstrations, which led to the formation of the Chinese Communist Party, were held in 1919. It?s where the Japanese occupation government announced its East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, where Mao declared victory over the Kuomintang in 1949, and where a million Red Guards swore loyalty to Mao during the Cultural Revolution. When the Chinese see a bunch of people gathering in Tiananmen Square, they don?t go all warm and fuzzy the way we do. The Chinese think, ?Here we go again.??

3.

Explanation: For about 300 years Jupiter's banded atmosphere has shown a remarkable feature to telescopic viewers, a large swirling storm system known as The Great Red Spot. In 2006, another red storm system appeared, actually seen to form as smaller whitish oval-shaped storms merged and then developed the curious reddish hue. Now, Jupiter has a third red spot, again produced from a smaller whitish storm. All three are seen in this image made from data recorded on May 9 and 10 with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. The spots extend above the surrounding clouds and their red color may be due to deeper material dredged up by the storms and exposed to ultraviolet light, but the exact chemical process is still unknown. For scale, the Great Red Spot has almost twice the diameter of planet Earth, making both new spots less than one Earth-diameter across. The newest red spot is on the far left (west), along the same band of clouds as the Great Red Spot and is drifting toward it. If the motion continues, the new spot will encounter the much larger storm system in August. Jupiter's recent outbreak of red spots is likely related to large scale climate change as the gas giant planet is getting warmer near the equator.

Que es lo pasa camale?n?

They say that when a song is stuck in your head, the best thing to do is sing it over and over until your head is done with it.

And so I sing, the lyrics:

Que es lo pasa camale?n?
Calma la envidia que me tienes
Aunque tu cambies de color,
Yo siempre se por donde vienes
Yo te conosco camale?n
Lo que te est? volviendo loco
Es que tu has visto poco a poco
Que tu maldad no me hace da?o
Que estoy mas fuerte cada a?o.
Y eso te esta rompiendo el coco

Que es lo que pasa camale?n
q tu maldad no me hace da?o
Que es lo que pasa camale?n
q aunque traten de pararme sigo fuerte cada a?o
Que es lo que pasa camale?n
yo vivo de la verdad, y tu comiendo del enga?o
Que es lo que pasa camale?n
a donde yo vaya tres guerreron van conmigo
Que es lo que pasa camale?n
ellos protegen mi espalda contra los malos amigos

Ten cuidado con el camale?n
que detras de la sonrisa lo que esconde es su rencor
Ten cuidado con el camale?n
aprende a reconocerlo, auqnue cambie de color
Ten cuidado con el camale?n
no me arrastra tu corriente porque no soy camaron

Ten cuidado con el camale?n
aunque te ense?e la cara, no te muestra el corazon
Ten cuidado con el camale?n
con anzuelo tan chiquito, no se pesca tiburon
Ten cuidado con el camale?n
dis que amigo, pero ten cuidao
Ten cuidado con el camale?n
te reconozco donde quiera, aunque llegues disfrazao

Report from Tossa

Mom is in Tossa de Mar at the moment. She says that all she hears there is the ChikiChiki.

Be Prepared.

UPDATE: John Chappel of Iberian Notes reports that "The Chiki-Chiki guy bombed at Eurovision and came in 16th. Bummer."

Nice to have Iberian Notes to keep up with the haps in Barcelona.

Nicer too, to have Euro kitch taken down a notch or two.

Here's another interesting item further down into John's post:

The Prado has a very cool exhibition opening soon and running through September: the subject is Renaissance portraits, 70 of them, by Durer, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, Van Eyck, and Botticelli, among others. El Pais has a slideshow that you should check out. I'm going; it'll give me an excuse to take a weekend trip to Madrid.

Just For Laughs

This seems to go with that, a sandwich of meandering and deliberate intentionality. Mitch Hedberg, what a talent. How tragic that he died of an overdose/heart attack three years ago. Can we become the moths who know the flame will kill us?

Question Authority?

Luego

(Luego= an Ahora past due.) These shots are from Sunday, actually.

I've been bearish lately, putting my shoulder into smallish paintings. There are a few things I want to generate before the summer kicks in.

Verbose hablaba posting to come soon.

Te Quiero Barcelona

Barcelona, Bardem, Allen, Johansson, Cruz, painting, guns... what's not to like?

Barcelona was all abuzz last year as they were shooting this movie, egghead street cred for the great Catalonian city by the sea. It looks like a love letter full of mash notes.

Fine with me so far, I'm looking forward to seeing the movie.

Bureaucracy is the natural enemy of art.

A friend just emailed this in and in the interest of pulling the viral fire alarm, this seems to be an issue with enough relevance to our lives as artists to treat it with some care and urgency.

I'm just digesting it at the moment. Somehow under the guise of finding a way to access work where the owner (artist) cannot be found, there is a possibility that we will lose the right to automatically own the copyright of artwork unless we steer each creation through a complex and costly legal process to certify every creative act as our right to the property we create.

Here's where I get to quote myself (12):

"Bureaucracy is the natural enemy of art."

Like a tiger, the best you can do is to get it to jump through the flaming hoops. Governments and tigers have this unfortunate tendency to want to eat you. The former tends to think it's doing you a favor.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on it. The external links at the bottom seems to have routes to other sites with more information.

(Oh yea, I should credit Thomas Nast with the image of the devouring tiger above.)

Memento

"...hmmmm. It's poetry."

Back in 1998, I had an opening at Chac Mool in West Hollywood and I was delighted, stunned, honored... to meet the great Robert Rauschenberg. Here's a couple of the fotos to put up on the fireplace mantle:

Vitrine

Painting

Dun beguiled myself.

I let the backbone slip.

I pulled Robbie and Seth in to test the rendering potential of the...

(BLOGPOST IN PROGRESS)

An eyeful here:

PruessPress

Monotypes in progress.

A closer look:

Ahora

The General Plan

A wall, a deck, stairs modeled on the ladder, a place to rack big stuff and a place to stash all the various piles currently heaped in the studio.

But first, I've got a few paintings to finish before I plug in the worm drive saw and air compressor.

Niko Bellic's Music

Niko's soft side. Be sure to check out the YouTube description: succinct & informative.

Live version here.

Scooters for Freedom!

I went to an urban planning conference many , many years ago where one engineer asserted that the best mass transit solution was the one consisting of personal vehicles: on demand, distributed, with maximum personal choice; just what we have now. The only thing that we are doing wrong is that our vehicles were too big... if only we all had smaller, single-passenger vehicles, then we could multiply the number of lanes... and stuff. Fewer cylinders per person, he said.

That's right.

The term ?democratic recession? was coined by Larry Diamond, a Stanford University political scientist, in his new book ?The Spirit of Democracy.? And the numbers tell the story. At the end of last year, Freedom House, which tracks democratic trends and elections around the globe, noted that 2007 was by far the worst year for freedom in the world since the end of the cold war. Almost four times as many states ? 38 ? declined in their freedom scores as improved ? 10.

What explains this? A big part of this reversal is being driven by the rise of petro-authoritarianism. I?ve long argued that the price of oil and the pace of freedom operate in an inverse correlation ? which I call: ?The First Law of Petro-Politics.? As the price of oil goes up, the pace of freedom goes down. As the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up.

Well then, it's clear, isn't it? If you want to pick up the pace of freedom, use less oil... let's have fewer cylinders per person. Voluntarily of course.

Scooters for freedom, people!

Now, I'm not averse to increasing the size of the cylinders, however. Life is for living, after all.

(Staying alive on a motorbike is another topic altogether. It's easier than it seems. Suffice to say that it can be done.)

Peering Through My Fingers

GTA 4: in defense of playing against type

Of course, I was one of the folks who plunked down a few ducats for the breaking distribution of Grand Theft Auto IV:

Leave it to the late night talk show hosts and media gossip blogs to note the gorilla in Hollywood's room. Call me a Yuppie, but I do in fact like to play against the assumptions of a good video game. I used to do this back in the day with the ancient Apple TANK game, where I would simply evade the hooded monsters and see how many I could trail behind me in pursuit. There is something interesting in bending the programmed assumptions toward an undesigned objective. Maybe there is a link to how I like to displace the authority of the brush as a tool in painting?

Maybe not.

I haven't logged enough hours into playing GTA 4 yet to say that I've exhausted the game by any means (and I don't think I ever will), but I do like to take the character of Niko Bellic and try to stride the streets of Liberty City looking for good deeds and avoid the dark side. I try to be a good citizen but nearly everyone I bump into in this game are quick to give me sh-t and tempt the dark response.

A friend told me recently of how one can in fact jack an ambulance and ride the virtual street responding to 9-11 calls. Cool! In what I hope is an anticipation of what is to come, it seems the designers of GTA 4 have indeed structured a small feature of what I hope will become a larger part of the future of video games: where you can interact with a virtual environment to the degree that one can go to the good or the bad side of the game. Just like life itself.

Meanwhile, I have yet to discover the location of any one the famed virtual nightspots where Niko can get down and dirty. Now that'll be a test of my virtual virtue.

Call it diligent research in cultural literacy.

Ahora

MANIFESTO

Andrew Hahn sent out the announcement for his new film:

Automat presents the premiere of 'Manifesto'.
'Manifesto' is my 52 minute no-budget bio-pic on
The Unabomber, starring David Hughes as Ted
Kaczynski.
Please join us for beer and snacks at Automat,
Thursday night in Chinatown.

Automat is a new supercool vending joint on Chung King Road across from China Art Objects and next to Mary Goldman's gallery. Here's a link to a blogpost from Cafe LA LA.

Something's Happening

I'm moving my studio next door. My studio space doubles, very nice.

ChinaTown is changing again, and again just when you think it's going to go to hell, it ends up changing in a good way. Joel Mesler is in town for a little while. Interesting things are happening with Dan Hug's (former?) gallery as Dan himself is currently soaring into the stratosphere with his new position as he takes the helm of Art Cologne. More news on that as this circumstance develops into the public realm. Robbie Kinberg has moved back from New York and he'll be in Joel's former studio tucked underneath Hop Louie. Evan Lintermans (painter) will move into my former studio. Bart Exposito, Phil Wagner and Mario Correa are all kicking butt in their studios, all making the best work so far in their lives and one can sense better to come.

ChinaTown has a great energy right now.

Here's a closer look:

What a difference a new corner makes.

A big pile of stuff. I have a notion of how to take care of the pile with a small loft in the back. It will be interesting to suss it out. Before I do that, I have a few paintings to make, so I get to continue managing the piles. At least there's a lot more elbow room in there.

A new kind of Ahora.