After a three month sojourn in Milan, Italy, I can't help but laugh my ass off when I read a piece like this, I saw it posted on Artforum.com:

In unrelated news, Daniel Libeskind has found himself in a battle of words with Italy's Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. According to Mediabistro and The Independent, the conflict began after Libeskind submitted his plans for a new set of buildings in Milan and Berlusconi said the structures were “not manly” and emanated a “sense of impotence.” The skyscraper, intended to be situated between buildings designed by the British architect Zaha Hadid and her Japanese colleague Arata Isozaki, curves dramatically, a feature that displeased Berlusconi, who also threatened to cancel the permissions for the project unless the architect revised his plans. Libeskind has fired back with his own volley of angry words. "In Fascist Italy, everything that was not 'straight' was considered 'perverse art,'" said Libeskind. "My tower is inspired by the work of Leonardo da Vinci, and great Italian culture. [Berlusconi] does not have the time or intellect to study these. As an American and Jew brought up in Poland, I find Berlusconi abominable. His concept of nationalism, of closing borders and denying what's different, is repugnant."

Years ago, Los Angeles implemented a 1% tax on new buildings of a certain size, with the money going to public art. The results have been pretty sad overall. There exists a few famous pieces that aren't bad, but compared to what goes in Europe (still imperfect of course), it's overall a little embarrassing. Alice Konitz, a young artist emigre living in LA with a recent feature by Michael Ned Holte in Artforum, recently received a public commission at the new Silver Lake library being built on Glendale and SIlver Lake Blvd. A good choice and a real one, but overall the abstract corporate art and hideous murals tend to overwhelm any of the few good decisions regarding publicly-funded public art in Los Angeles. Laurie Firstenberg of LAXART has attempted to push the tide for public art towards a more vital and contemporary program, but one non-profit agency with only so much funding can't have the same effect as the awesome force of a public agency with somebody knowledgeable at the helm.

The cultural affairs and civic art program overall in LA, as far as I can tell, has been worse than embarrassing, it's been irrelevant. Irrelevant to whom exactly, at first to me. I'm some who pays attention, and there hasn't been anything to pay attention to. Furthermore, it seems irrelevant to those working in cultural production, if not only for those covering cultural production in the city (like me). We should be creating landmarks by artists important to Los Angeles, not destroying them haphazardly (remember the Ed Ruscha mural that got painted over downtown, whoops). Say what you will about LACMA's new extension (and I've said my fair share of hard remarks), the Chris Burden piece satisfies all the critieria for a amazing public art project. It's accessible from the street by everybody, it's by an important artist both for the city and the international art community, and, perhaps more subjectively, it looks amazing. Important to the city, doesn't necessarily mean a LA resident (though this helps). Just to continue with this example, Burden's piece is really about LA. Burden had collected and refurbished scores of old LA streetlights, and gathered together make a spectacular gleaming birthday cake for the city. Olafur Eliasson's recent waterfalls piece in New York satisfies a lot of the same criteria, though Eliasson isn't a New York artist per se.

Par of the problem is of course the lack of cultural infrastructure to connect cultural producers, from the marginal to the mainstream and then to successfully export the idea outside the city. Certain figures have tried to fill the vacuum, like FYA and Artslant.com, but neither have fully succeeded, if only because the project is bigger than one or two agencies and requires a strategic plan.

The reason I go into this diatribe about the City of Angels and the territory it dominates, is that the county is hiring a new Director of Civic Arts Programs, I'm a little too young to care to work in the hulking bureaucracy of municipal politics, but maybe you, yes you, are not. We really need someone really good if we are ever going to mature as an international city. So apply already!

I've written here before how underwhelmed I am by sparky new technologies, more often than not they hide in their pyrotechnics a lack of content. The explosions masks that the story is as human as the computer you're reading this from and as emotional as my toilet.

Technology hasn't often worked in the service of literature, weak attempts at hypertext bore me and Google has become the place people look for answers not Shakespeare. So it goes. I'm no luddite, perhaps this blog is a testament to that.

Two recent websites have sparked interest outside the author and their publicist, the first was indie darling Miranda July's simple site devoted to her book No One Belongs Here More Than You, which had July writing out her messages in dry-erase marker with the same kind of self-conscious, awkward cuteness that characterizes her book. Self-conscious awkward cuteness sounds pejorative (and maybe it is a little), but really, sometimes and in some, it's ways my bag; I always make passes at girls who wear glasses and dig the naive simplicity Beat Happening as much as the cardigan wearing twee loving twentysomething.

This a long way to get getting to the second site, built for Rachel Kushner's Telex from Cuba, released this month. None of the awkward cuteness of July is found here, in fact it's better than most web-art projects I've seen trying to pull off the same thing. The book, I've only read the reviews and the first chapter accessible at the NY Times, but the site built for the book opens up to a map of Cuba with a simple haunting piano music like the last song at the last bar at the end of the road, where Borscht Belt comedians and Cuban strippers come to die.

The site displays a map of Cuba with different locations lined up. Each site, when accessed, gives a brief slide show, like some Gerhard Richter paintings or even some Sebald stories the text/image (and here music) is a little haunting. Snaps of French Nazi Christian de la Maziere mix in with weighted family snaps with the ocassional blurred face and glamour shots of some Castro's balck bereted female revolutionaries. And the ghostly presence of the images, with Kushner's robust and sometimes sexy prose, brings bout an epiphany. One that maybe attracted Kushner to this space as well. There's a lost world in Cuba.

There was place called Cuba, filled with gambling halls packed with government spies and leftist prostitutes, a Cuba of shitty tenements and fields owned by the United Fruit Co., and lorded over by bully Fulgencio Batista (our man in Havana, another painful CIA blunder), with the rebels in the mountains who can never win, or says the American expatriate sipping rum punch at the country club, knowing little that his waiter works for Castro. It's like all these strange in between places that are now gone forever that play on the American imagination, Casablanca when the neon lights of Ric's cafe americain blinked into the desert, or the weathered maps and moving red lines Spielberg plays on in the Indiana Jones films. Some exotic place, filled with excess and troubles, where no one is in the right, but the glamor and the danger mingle together in an intoxicating cocktail. Though this kind of lost imaginary is always tinged with romanticism, I expect Kushner's novel punctures it as much as it explores it.

The first chapter of Kushner's novel (mentioned earlier on the NY Times website)
a relates the memories of a man who spent his boyhood as the princely scion of a United Fruit executive. Who years later, his exile complete, relates the tales of his lost world, which for all its inequity and inequalities that put Castro on the right side of history, is still gone, and the ritual, glamor, and elusive imaginary went with it.

A curious piece of the internets in the service of literature, or more likely something separate from the book, a project born from the same imaginary, producing a strange result of its own.

Maybe I'm a sucker and maybe I've allegiance to a fellow local art critic and colleague (Kushner writes for Artforum from La, amongst other magazine), but though I've not had the opportunity to read the book, I'm duly intrigued.

Kushner has two reading coming up in LA. Wednesday at the Hammer with Salvador Placencia and at Skylight Books this Friday.

While cavorting around Europe and going to various conferences and festivals for a brief week and a half, I was on the Hans Ulrich Obrist tour, I saw him three times in totally different locations across Europe, and the in between time, he was in New York, Reykjavik, and Granada (well-documented in pictures by Artforum.com). A dream project of mine is to map the globetrotting Swiss curator's travels. In a way, I don't think HUO is any better or worse than other curators, but his absolute ubiquity is near legendary and this ubiquity is worth capturing, how many others, probably not even businessmen or travelling salesmen or diplomats have the travel route of the indefatigable HUO. The relatively low-cost of travel coupled with globalization make HUO a cultural harbinger. Though other art folks travel quite a bit, I don't think anyone does it like him

The HUO map of the world: every place he travels would be mapped and if he visits a place more than once (London, New York, Basel) the circle of his visit gets larger with the number of his visits in the center. The map would be updated according to HUO's travel schedule which is regular.

Wherever there's creative entrepreneurship or urban cheerleading events or academic conferences, HUO will be there. Like a Tom Joad for using creativity for the purpose of development, HUO will be there. From China to Russia to LA to Dubai to Granada to Cagliari to New York to Sao Paolo to Dakar, HUO has been there. In the end, if I were looking to hire a spy, I'd recruit HUO.

I think this could be a beautiful web project if any web designer's out there want to collaborate on the HUO Map of the World, either as a Google Maps or Google Earth hack. Or I offer this idea freely to the world, if anyone's got the chutzpah to put it together.

Back in Los Angeles, listening to the distant ranchero music, while the sirens rattle by and the heat wave doesn't seem to ever break, the small talk next to me at the cafe is an offhand chat about physical abuse from a greaser and his girlfriend wearing an semi-ironic traditional Mexican dress and matching blue flip-flops. "I haven't seen my father in fifteen years," he says. "My grandfather was a noble laurate," she replies. LA small talk, maybe it's the same in Milan and I just didn't understand it.

Rough landing from Italy, which I guess is how it goes sometimes, you leave your life on hold for three months and somethings bound to break. But happily back and happily posting from the blog. thanks for all those for their patience. When you self publish like this, a magazine of one, life comes on and off, at normal magazine you meet your deadlines or you take a sabbatical, so it goes. Only a few like Tyler Green over at MAN or Mark Sarvas at The Elegant Variation are indefatigable bloggers, say what you will about their coverage, love it or hate it, but they're as regular as Ex-Lax.

The Expanded Field is getting regular.

I apologize for my lackadaisical approach to the blog, working many many hours a day, will be back in Los Angeles in a week and will resume daily blogging from there.

In the mean time, enjoy this peculiar animation by BLU called Muto. I don't normally go for this stuff, but there's something particularly brilliant about this one.

At the Berlin Biennial, I tried to interview every artists whose work the Biennial had shown to me for the first time (whether I heard about the artists before that moment or not), as you see in my post below, Ahmet Ogut was one, and here Tris Vonna-Michell is another.

Perched in the top floor of the five-story Kunst Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Vonna-Michell has rebuilt Detroit. Not in an architectural model (though there is a map), Vonna-Michell has rebuilt Detroit as a recording studio, a stage, and an installation. This Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art” in German) includes many different elements including the artist himself who will be on hand for much the exhibition, ready to perform at a moment's notice.

Composed of slide shows, sound, moving images, installations, and objects, the installation (if we call it that) takes up the entire top floor. Vonna-Michell uses Studio A as his point of entry into the imaginary of Detroit. In 1959 Motown Records created its first recording studio, the famous “Studio A.” It was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week from 1959 until 1972, recording some of the most famous Motown hits of that period from Aretha Franklin to Marvin Gaye. Although in 1968 the company moved it’s headquarters to a ten-story building in downtown Detroit, artists continued to record in “Studio A”.

“Studio A” acts as both a point of entry for Vonna-Michel but also a point of rupture for Detroit. Now Detroit is an abandoned industrial city, still struggling to find its identity after the automobile industry collapse. Berlin becomes and interesting contrast to the Motor City in a city that suffered its own set backs and identity confusions and seems to be bouncing back.

This interview as well as the last one was made with Luca Legnani and produced by Check-In Architecture.

I keep a handful of museum subscriptions on my Reader most of which are only sporadically updated, something that Tyler Green at MAN has regularly and rightly kvetched about. And MOCA rarely updates it's podcast, but lately they've loaded a few really nice podcast to coincide with their current exhibitions, a handful wth with Lawrence Weiner, recently here in Milan for a show at Massimo de Carlo with ponytail, beard, tattoos, and attitude looks like the coolest motherfucker in the world.

The other podcasts that I'm downright delighted with is a conversation between Allan Kaprow and Paul McCarthy, who started out as teacher and student, but kept a dialogue going for forty years. In the above photo, they sort of look like good and evil pictures of one another. Kaprow in his blue jeans and trimmed beard looks the light-hearted post-60s conceptual guru which in some ways he is (if guru is not quite the right word, it's the closest thing I have in my arsenal to describe his attitudes and influence) and McCarthy, the man in black, his beard longer and more unkempt, but no less jolly in his grin than Kaprow, not far from the butt plug Santa he was hawing not long ago at Michelle Maccarone. Both of them radically affected younger artists both in their practice s artists and as teachers, I never really thought as one in a historical continuation of the other, I usually connect McCarthy to the Viennese Actionists, but this conversation shows the differences and connections between the two artists in a perfectly pointed way.

Some future art history dissertation or exhibtion to be sure. Either way enjoy.

A raft of Lawrence Weiner tracks and the McCarthy/Kaprow conversation here.

While in Europe I've been working on this project called Check-In Architecture (making videos, writing essays, conducting interviews, maintaining a second blog, travelling incessantly, etc), I've been a bit lazy about posting the details but I'll get to that sometime in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, I did an interview with an artist I found really compelling at the Berlin Biennial named Ahmet Ögüt. Ahmet himself goes into a lot of the background information about his projects and practice, so I'll let him do the talking on this one.

This is another instance where the Italian saying that I've grown to love duly applies:

"Morto il papa, se ne fa un altro."
"The pope dies, another is found."

So awhile ago I felt like the only one publicly mourning the demise of the Art Center program (alum Michael Ned Holte later wrote a strong obituary in Artforum, Dec, '07) in Art Criticism (a program I might add, that for better or worse, supplied LA with about half of its current art critics), and now USC with its deep pockets has found us another, a brisk 9-month MA in Arts Journalism. Is this program better than the last? It's a little hard to tell.

The breakdown: well, when USC says arts journalism they really seem to mean every word of it, it's not necessarily criticism and its not necessarily about art. The people who are heading the program are largely drawn from newspaper journalism (last time I checked its pulse, it seemed a bit weak to me) and appear to run the gamut in cultural criticism (a Pulitzer or two in their ranks). The program will ally itself with all the other preexisting schools of the arts (including the the School of Architecture, School of Cinematic Arts, Roski School of Fine Arts,School of Theatre and Thornton School of Music.)

In my mind this could go either way, it could honestly train good journalists and critics who will head out into the world, fully prepared in the most advanced ideas and approaches to art, a smattering of history and discipline specific information as well as an expanded view of cultural critique in general. Or, it could be a bit stagnant, less than experimental, preparing students for jobs that don't exist anymore. Music critics will likely be interviewing (Insert Name of One Hit Wonder Band) for trashy music magazines, art critics will be writing fifty dollar reviews for websites while to scrape together a life from gallery, museum, and/or teaching jobs, and book critics, do we even have many of those left anymore. Edmund Wilson is turning over in his grave. Clement Greenberg's scepter was shattered by Krauss, though a few it's pieces can be found stuck in the side of Artforum and Frieze.

Ready to apply? The deadline for applications is July 1.

Information on the program can be found here and here. If you want to apply (all you budding critics and seasoned pros looking for a break from a stormy career) the place to do so is here.