Doug Aitken's Acid Modernism

The Venice, CA home that artist Doug Aitken shares with Gemma Ponsa is representative of what he calls “Acid Modernism.” It is trippy and mod, with tables that can be played as instruments, secret doors, and walls painted to match the outdoor foliage you see through adjacent windows.

Crazy 4 Kate Kelton's Cult Culture

Kate Kelton pointing to her work at Gallery 1988’s Crazy 4 Cult pop-up show.

Gallery1988 is an LA-based pop culture art gallery. On Thursday, I attended the opening of their very first New York show, Crazy 4 Cult, and the line was around the block of their Meatpacking district pop-up. Fans actually arrived in the morning to hold their place in line. Fortunately, participating artist / actress Kate Kelton was there to let me in, saving me hours of waiting in line.

To get a feel for the culture here, Kate is among the 200 artists in the show. She is known from her prolific appearances in Tic Tac ads over the past decade, and as one of the twins from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, but that will change starting Thursday and Friday, August 16 & 17, when the IFC series Bullet in the Face premieres. In the show, she plays, “a pretty fabulous femme fatale,” alongside co-stars Eddie Izzard and Eric Roberts in what is being billed as “the most violent sitcom ever.”

Kate’s work in the Gallery1988 show—like the rest of the art—references cult film. I managed a short exchange with gallery co-owner Jason Karp to learn how he creates so much interest in his openings.

Click to read more ...

WORD: Sniffing Out Inspiration

(screen grab of Synesthesia)

I like subscribing to things that send me on a path of discovery and thinking, inspiring my work and life. Put another way, I like stuff that completely derails what I’m doing and that is preferably not Facebook. So in an effort to put you off the tracks for a bit, check out A Very Short List.

Started in 2006 by Kurt Anderson (of Studio 360), this “delightful e-mail that shares cultural gems from a different curator every day,” now has over 100,000 subscribers.

Here, I’ll get you started by making you read the VSL post from a few days ago and you’ll soon be eating a bag of jelly beans, learning why Scotch smells like Band-Aids, and discovering if you are afflicted with synesthesia!

DESIGN: The World's First Living Buildings by International Living Future Institute

This video about “living buildings” reminds me of the lower income apartment building called Hunderwasser Haus that I visited in Vienna. Designed by Austrian artist Hunderwasser, it features sloping floors, undulating walls, and “tree tenants”—trees planted inside the building that grow out through windows and walls.  It was the artist’s intent to design the building in harmony with nature.

The International Living Future Institute is taking a significantly more scientific approach to creating buildings integrated with nature. For their Living Buildings work, they have won the 2012 Buckminster Fuller Institute’s annual “The Buckminster Fuller Challenge,” which awards one winner $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.

Says International Living Future Institute board member Dennis J. Wilde, “Much of the change that we now need to navigate is a process of changing our framing stories. One of the most important and one of the powerful ways of changing our framing stories is through demonstrations. Showing people what’s possible and that’s exactly what you’re engaged in with the Living Buildings work.”

MUSIC: 'There She Goes Again,' and Again

Electric Youth

The Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again” is about addiction / prostitution / dependency of some kind, or as Lou Reed says—and only he knows—“The story of lost love in America.” The La’s did their version, which is significantly more literal in its reference to heroin. And there have been many, many covers. But College (featuring Electric Youth) borrows the line, “There she goes again,” for their song, “She Never Came Back,” in what just might finally end the cycle of addiction…

Click to read more ...