Author Archive for c-monster

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Peru or Bust: Please help fund our Kickstarter!

By c-monster on April 29, 2012 in Announcements, Art, C-Monster, Installation and Peru. 0 Comments


Schematic for La Luz, to be installed by Celso at the old Inca sun temple in Cusco, Peru.

Yes, I’m asking for money.

This summer, I’m going to be working as studio assistant/translator/chasqui for my partner-in-crime Celso on a series of installations that will go up at the Qorikancha  the old Inca sun temple in Cusco, Peru. For the project — which is titled La Luz — he’ll be building a series of architectural installations around the ruins grounds (and the attached Dominican monastery) using several hundred bottles of Inca Kola, the nuclear yellow Peruvian soda (see images above and below). It will be a pop paean to the gold that once covered the site. The piece will be pulled apart and re-installed in a new location every three days. At the end of each installation, the public will be allowed to take the Inca Kola home.

The museum that manages the site, the Museo Qorikancha y Convento de Santo Domingo, has commissioned the piece. But as with most arts institutions in Peru, the budgets are tiny. Which is why we’re asking for your help. This is going to be a beautiful project — unlike anything the museum has ever done. So pleasepleaseplease help us get to Peru! Any donation, no matter how small, makes a difference.

Please click through to Celso’s Kickstarter to send us your pennies. We have all kinds of goodies for rewards. And we promise that your donations will be wisely and prudently spent (on lots of Inca Kola). If you’re a regular reader, please think of this as a way to help me keep doing what I love to do — namely, writing about great-weird art I find wherever I happen to be.

Thanks so much! And thanks for reading C-Mon!!!

xox,
C.

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Calendar. 04.25.12.

By c-monster on April 25, 2012 in C-Monster, Galleries, Los Angeles and Prints. 0 Comments


Times, 2011, by Stanley Donwood. Part of an 18-foot panel showing the destruction of L.A. at the artist’s solo exhibit Lost Angeles, at Subliminal Projects. Opens Saturday at 8pm, in Echo Park. (Image courtesy of the artist and Subliminal Projects.)

  • L.A.: Mickalene Thomas, The Origin of the Universe, at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Through August 19, in Santa Monica.
  • Dallas: Erwin Wurm, Beauty Business, at Dallas Contemporary. Through August.
  • NYC: Freehand Jobs, a group show at Pandemic Gallery. Opens Saturday at 7pm, in Williamsburg.
  • NYC: Charles Yuen, at Valentine. Opens Friday at 6pm, in Ridgewood/Bushwick.
  • Plus, see all my latest New York picks over at Gallerina…
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Taco U.S.A.

By c-monster on April 23, 2012 in C-Monster and Food. 4 Comments


A vintage Taco Bell sign at Taco Bell HQ in Irvine, California. (Photo by C-M.)

Hey Folks:

My first story for NPR’s All Things Considered — a taco tour with the inimitable Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco U.S.A.: How Mexican Food Conquered America — is now up online.

Please check it, like it, Tweet it, pimp it, recommend it. And remember to eat lots of tacos!!!

Besos,
C.

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Miscellany. 04.23.12.

By c-monster on April 23, 2012 in C-Monster, Miscellany, New York and Street Art. 2 Comments


Not on Sale, by Skewville. Outside of Woodward Gallery on the Lower East Side. On view through April. (Image courtesy of Skewville.)

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Last chance: Liz Magic Laser at Derek Eller Gallery in NYC.

By c-monster on April 19, 2012 in C-Monster, Galleries, New York, Performance art and Video. 2 Comments


A still from I Feel Your Pain, video documentation of a performance piece from last fall. (Image courtesy of the artist and Derek Eller Gallery.)

A man and a woman kiss. They drown each other in flattery. They tell each other that they’re “the one.” They say no one understands. This may sound like the purplest of purple prose scenarios. (And it is.) But it’s actually a live performance that employs the transcript of a Sarah Palin interview by Glenn Beck as its script. Instead of Beck and Palin in the lead roles, however, it’s a couple of young lovers. The words may be the same, but the actions aren’t. It’s grody-fascinating to watch.

For the performance piece, I Feel Your Pain, Liz Magic Laser created more than a dozen theatrical shorts out of television news transcripts (staged as part of the Performa festival last year). Steve Kroft’s 60 Minutes interview with Barack Obama in the wake of the Osama Bin Laden assassination becomes a clubby conversation between two bros sipping soda. It was literally nauseating to watch. Not because the actors were bad. Quite the contrary. The performances are all strong (and Annie Fox, shown above, is particularly riveting to watch). It’s all just a reminder of the uncomfortably cozy relationship between politicians and some members of the media.

For a few pieces, like the ones mentioned above, Laser employs a single interview as script. For others, she weaves together similar language from several Q&As into one cohesive story. Interviews and speeches by Mary Landrieu, Christine O’Donnell and George W. Bush are spliced together into a single work that addresses culpability. It is a riveting work of political theater. Literally. (Though I could have done without the mime-clown character — I mean, why???? — that Laser introduces in a few of the pieces.)

You can catch video of the project at the Derek Eller Gallery through this Saturday, April 21. If you’re a political or media junkie, this represents an intriguing, outrage-inducing intersection. Find the screening times here. And yes, it’s worth it to sit through them all…

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Calendar. 04.17.12.

By c-monster on April 18, 2012 in C-Monster and Photography. 0 Comments


Lightning Drawing 7, 2011, by Cassandra C. Jones. Part of the artist’s solo exhibit Photos Taken #drawings, at Eli Ridgway Gallery. Opens Saturday at 4pm. (Image courtesy of the artist and Eli Ridgway.)

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What I’m Reading.

By c-monster on April 16, 2012 in Books, C-Monster, Peru, Photography and What I'm Reading. 0 Comments


A family in in Zapallal, a squatter settlement on the outskirts of Lima. (Image courtesy of Andrés Marroquín Winkelmann.)

I’ve been marinating in photographer Andrés Marroquín Winkelmann’s latest book Zapallal | Yurinaki for several days — a chronicle of two Peruvian communities that are connected by circumstance and economics, even as they stand worlds apart. Separated by the Andes, Yurinaki sits at the edge of the central Amazon. Zapallal is located on the outskirts of Lima, tucked into the dusty-apocalyptic hills that make up the Peruvian coast.

The latter settlement came into existence in the 1980s, after a series of economic crises and the country’s simmering Internal Conflict led hundreds of thousands of rural Peruvians to migrate to the capital. Many of the residents of Zapallal hail from or are in some way linked to Yurinaki. But they are connected in other ways, too: by poverty, by social class, by their lack of political power.

In these communities, Marroquín Winkelmann finds a rare beauty. A young man sits cinematically in a mototaxi. A cat howls from a rickety wood platform while a pig watches pensively. A little boy plays in a toy car without wheels; he has nowhere to go. Marroquín uses lighting to dramatic effect — even in daylight settings — for images that take on an almost baroque quality in tone and content. (Note the daughter, above, in an almost blessing-like pose with the fly swatter.)

In Peru — a country where nearly one in ten people live in extreme poverty, and nearly one in three live under the poverty line — the lives of the poor can seem almost like an abstract concept. But Marroquín takes the statistics and makes them human, recording dignity where most folks wouldn’t think to look.

Zapallal | Yurinaki is available at Dalpine. Plus, see some of the images from the series on Marroquín’s website. (The puny images on my blog don’t do it justice.)

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Photo Diary: The Dawn of Egyptian Art at the Met.

By c-monster on April 13, 2012 in C-Monster, Museums, New York and Sculpture. 0 Comments

I’ll admit it: I often glaze over when I enter the Met’s Egyptian galleries, which are full of monumental everything covered in stiff hieroglyphics. But a new exhibit devoted to works created prior to the consolidation of pharaonic power in Egypt is mind-blowing for the humble scale of the pieces (many of which could fit in the palm of a hand) and their charming spontanaeity. Not to mention that some of these works are totally effin’ cute: those early Egyptians sure knew how to carve dogs.

The best part is that this show isn’t in the over-trampled Egyptian wing, but in the Lehman Gallery, at the rear of the museum. (That awful space that looks like a 1980s cruise ship atrium.) Which means it’s nice and quiet — making this just the right kinda show for a 420 chill.

The Dawn of Egyptian Art is up through August 10 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Continue reading ‘Photo Diary: The Dawn of Egyptian Art at the Met.’

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Calendar. 04.11.12.

By c-monster on April 11, 2012 in C-Monster, Galleries and Sculpture. 0 Comments


Watermelon, 2006, a porcelain sculpture by Ai Weiwei. Part of the artist’s solo exhibit at Lisson Gallery, in Milan. Opens Thursday. (Image courtesy of Lisson Gallery.)

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Photo Diary: In Wonderland, surrealist women at LACMA.

By c-monster on April 9, 2012 in C-Monster, Los Angeles, Museums and Painting. 0 Comments


Las dos Fridas, 1939, by Frida Kahlo.


Rainy Day Canape, 1970, by Dorothea Tanning.


I Have No Shadow, 1940, by Kay Sage.

LACMA has a beguilingly weird show of surrealist artists up: In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women in Mexico and the United States tracks surreal art in North America during the middle years of the 20th century. There’s some freaky dark stuff in the show (including a picture by Lee Miller that show mastectomied breasts on a plate). But it also has its charmingly bizarre parts (love the Tanning stuffed couch piece above). And it includes little-known works by well-known artists. Definitely worth it if you’re looking for something out of the ordinary.

In Wonderland is up through May 6th.

Continue reading ‘Photo Diary: In Wonderland, surrealist women at LACMA.’

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