Chris Wiley

Beginning at 8pm on July 31^st, Lucas Blalock will be signing copies of his self-published book I Believe You, Liar at Eighth Veil in Los Angeles.

Like the book’s opening image of a woman caught open mouthed, mid-sentence, Blalock’s photographs speak in a manner that seems to disclose as much as it withholds—they are semaphores without sense, smoke signals sent at the hour before dawn. Together, they make for a hallucinatory gem of a book, which seems to be structured according to the logic of dreams.

Here’s the “publisher’s description”:

LaToya Ruby Frazier has worked for the last seven years unflinchingly documenting her relationship with her family, with a particular focus on her often difficult, yet loving relationship with her mother. The resulting photographic and video works are redolent, in both content and style, of the direct cinema of filmmakers like Frederick Weisman and Albert and David Maysles and the concerned photojournalism of Mary Ellen Mark and Eugene Richards. However, unlike her predecessors, Frazier makes a virtue of subjectivity, rather than attempting to exorcize it. She invites the viewer into her world, portraying the struggles of poverty, drug addiction, and male absence in the contemporary black family from the inside out.

Considering its themes--the ethnographic gaze, colonialist knowledge/power systems, the ineluctable battle between culture and nature--Lothar Baumgarten's show at Marian Goodman Gallery would seem to have no right to be beautiful. Almost as a rule, when one confronts this kind of exhibition it is wise to gird oneself against a coming onslaught of boring work bolstered by dry, grinding pedantry or (worse) boring work justified by way of obfuscatory warblings lifted from a litany of fashionable "post-"s (structuralism, modernism, colonialism, feminism, etc.). Nevertheless, Baumgarten's show is subtle, considered, and ravishing.

Stan VanDerBeek was once a major figure of the New York avant-guard. He associated with luminaries like Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Robert Morris, Allan Kaprow, and Yvonne Rainer, showed at major museums, participated in international art events, and worked as an artist-in-residence at NASA and M.I.T. In 1977, he was the subject of a retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives. But, since his death in 1984 at the age of 57, he has been largely forgotten.