University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

To be determined

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To be determined

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Content

TO BE DETERMINED

by
Alexander Israel

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS

August 2010

Copyright 2010 Alexander Israel
ii
Table of Conents

Abstract iii
Chapter 1: A Story 1
Chapter 2: A Proposition 6
Conclusion 18
Bibliography 20

iii
Abstract

This thesis attempts to both illustrate and explain how the specific, given conditions of a
time and place inform an art practice. This thesis, however, does not consider a moment
in the historical past, and is not buoyed by the wisdom and hindsight of history. Rather,
the thesis demands that the time at hand is now and that the setting to consider is its
author’s personal daily experience in and around Los Angeles, California. While the first
chapter of the thesis looks into the recent past to tell a story about a moment of profound
discovery for the author, a moment that occurred in 2008 in Hollywood, California, the
second chapter is a proposition about the changing nature of contemporary art practice
today. It references specific artists and their recent or current projects, as well as current
events, parallel practices, technologies and phenomena.

1
Chapter 1: A Story

I’m sitting alone at Sharky’s Woodfire Mexican Grill, at 1718 Cahuenga, just north of
Hollywood Blvd. There are a couple of empty tables in the storefront windows facing the
street where I find myself sitting and eating my lunch. Framed by this storefront window
is the Greyhound bus station across the street: the Hollywood Greyhound bus station. I
wait, I watch, a bus arrives.

A few people step off, empty-handed: a young blonde woman holding the hand of a toe-
headed toddler; then a wrinkly older man in a baseball cap and track jacket; and a
teenager wearing baggy jeans and an afro. There’s a tall average Joe type of guy in his
early thirties who gets off next, and he’s carrying a whole bunch of stuff: a handful of
suits on coat hangers wrapped in thin flowing plastic, a laptop computer bag, and a
tubular piece of black foam. The bus driver opens up the bus’ storage compartment and
proceeds to help this guy take out a large blue duffle bag and a box that, layered in
packing and duct tape, must have been wrapped and unwrapped more than twice.
Everyone goes to the bathroom and gets back on the bus except for the tall guy. He stands
there waiting outside the station presiding over his things as the bus rolls off to
Bakersfield, Fresno, or Vegas. So I wonder to myself: what’s his plan?

A sign on the side of the station reads Welcome To Bienvenidos A Hollywood. I think
about the fact that multiple times everyday any number of transplants set foot in this so-
2
called Promised Land. They arrive here, the manifest destination at the end of the long
road from wherever: the Hollywood Greyhound bus station. This stardusted port of entry
to the magical dreamscape of Los Angeles is like a reality TV-show Ellis Island. Passion,
hope, faith, desperation, tragedy, the American dream, and all its shortcomings packed
together in a simple yet magical moment of everyday life. I feel a buzz.

“It starts in my toes and I crinkle my nose, wherever it goes I always know” is a line from
the chorus of a song called “Bubbly” by the Malibu-raised singer-songwriter and
Grammy Award-winner Colbie Caillat. The song reigned for nineteen weeks at the top of
the Adult Contemporary Billboard Chart in 2008, and must have played on my car radio
at some point on the day of my Sharkey’s Woodfire Mexican Grill discovery. It’s funny
because for whatever else Caillat is describing, her lyric perfectly sums up the buzz: a
resonant physical tingling, or bubbling. For me, this physical sensation indicates an
experience of cultural value. I feel the buzz when I come across something that feels
important, that moves me, that instinctively reveals some truth about America, our plight
as the so-called leaders of the free world, our collective pop humanness. I never buzzed
listening to “Bubbly” because it never revealed anything I didn’t already know, but I did
buzz watching that bus station. Personally, I’ve buzzed for the art of Andy Warhol, Jeff
Koons and Cady Noland. I’ve buzzed for the music of The Beach Boys and Michael
Jackson and the writing of Joan Didion and Bret Easton Ellis, for the choreography of
Michael Jordan and for the emotional complexities of The Hills. For me, he beauty of the
buzz is that it can’t be predicted. At its best, it accompanies an experience that against my
3
better judgment shouldn’t be buzzing (a trashy reality T.V. show), that is seamlessly
disguised as something I think that I already know (a kitschy porcelain Koons statue),
that seems firmly assertive despite suspicious or unknown internal logic (just how does
Michael Jordan’s body do that?). Sometimes I buzz for a work that speaks in an unknown
language I feel compelled to decipher (Michael Jackson’s screaming), something new
that feels urgent (a poignant Didion novel), something ineffable and all the more
compelling for it.

When I was in college at Yale University in the early 2000’s (oftentimes buzzed in a
different sense of the word), I went to a lecture that Michael Fried gave on campus with
the hope that I’d be able to ask him a silly question: I wanted to know if his feelings
about Minimalism had changed since he penned the canonical “Art and Objecthood.” I
don’t remember his lecture at all—it may have been about Albrect Durer and I think I fell
asleep—but when it ended I politely waited to approach him and I asked my question.
His response was great. First he admitted that Minimalism had won, and then he said that
whenever he saw minimal artworks in galleries, he just didn’t get them—and that he still
doesn’t. He just feels an emanating buzz and nothing more. Fried’s use of the word in a
negative sense prompted my adoption of it as a positive adjective for describing an
artwork, an incident or an experience. For me the buzz was it. What could be better than
that vibrating resonance I had gotten from so many Andres, Flavins and Judds?

4
Back to the bus. My discovery of the Greyhound station took place about two years ago,
when Colbie Caillat’s neo-folk ballad was ringing in everybody’s head, at a moment
when I had given notice at my then job and was poised to begin the MFA program for
which this thesis is a requirement. Watching the bus station through that window was a
“revealing experience” to borrow Tony Smith’s words, taken from his 1966
Conversations with Samuel Wagstaff Jr. Like Smith’s experience of the unfinished New
Jersey Turnpike in the early 1950s, I noticed things in that moment on Cahuenga that
made a profound impact on my thinking about the nature of art, its limits, and the
differences between an unmediated experience and one that has a frame around it.

As an artist, I inevitably ask: how could I put my frame around the bus station the way the
window at Sharkey’s had framed it for me? How could I export this moving buzz-
inducing experience into my art? My first thought seemed to provide a productive
answer: I could make a structuralist video! I could record the bus pulling into the station
and frame the passenger door so as to capture the fresh-faced newcomers getting their
first whiffs of the not-so-fresh air. It could all be there—the bus, the Greyhound logo, a
palm tree, golden light. The characters—they’re built in; like the tall guy with the stuff,
they just arrive. The soundtrack: traffic or a musical score? This I’d have to figure out
later. I instantly remember the beginning of the Guns ‘N Roses video for “Welcome to
the Jungle” when Axl gets off the bus in LA, suitcase in hand, as he had in reality at the
age of 17. And then I come to my senses.

5
Then I ask ‘why bother?’ Why the need to formally re-frame this experience at all? Why
convert it into video art when the bus stop isn’t going anywhere, the stream of American
Idol hopefuls it welcomes is seemingly never-ending, the counter at Sharkey’s is free and
open to anyone, and the experience, the buzz, exists on location in the flow of the
landscape itself. Why force the experience into a frame as some kind of illustration,
knowing full well that the buzz would run the risk of being lost in translation, or at best, it
would simply be transformed into some other buzz?

Tony Smith found a way. He framed his experience of the long dark endless highway into
the matte black sculptural forms for which he is best known. Lacking the gestalt of given
geometries, at first take works like Duck (1962-63), Amaryllis (1965), and Stinger (1967-
68) evade formal cohesion and finality in the minds of their viewers. They keep us
buzzed, walking around them with a gravity that absorbs both light and our attention—up
to a point. Once we come to understand these steel forms (a process which admittedly can
take some time), they rest firmly in position: illustrations, static milestones set to rest
along the eternal turnpike of Smith’s experience.

Turnpikes merge into interstates, and interstates merge into Freeways that end here in Los
Angeles. Bret Easton Ellis wrote, “People are afraid to merge on Freeways in Los
Angeles.” This may be true. Freeways delineate this landscape. They carry bus-drivers
that carry passengers that carry dreams. Most of these merge-fearing drivers are wearing
frames the rest perched on their noses. So am I. Sunglasses frame LA.
6
Chapter 2: A Proposition

Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither art nor popular
culture. Usually it has been related, closely or distantly, to both. The work is diverse, but
shares certain common attributes. This work is what David Robbins calls “High
Entertainment”; He refers to its practitioners as “Independent Imaginations”. Robbins has
predicted its coming onslaught as an effect of technological shifts—namely the closing of
the gap in quality between consumer and professional recording devices and a general
increase in accessibility to mass-media-distribution (via the internet). What is happening
now, he argues, marks the beginning of a generational shift in creative output—a shift
away from the given and digestible notions of both art and mass-culture as we understand
them.

This new work seems to be fed-up with some of art’s self-imposed limitations: its strict
contextual dependencies, its obligation towards taking up some position of criticality, and
the well-oiled system that names it, surrounds it, and shelters it from change (more about
these three points later). Likewise, the burgeoning independent imaginations, as Robbins
explains, are apprehensive to enter the realm of total mass culture; they are apprehensive
to sell-out and forsake the creative urge that art affords: to explore and discover new
forms of expression. The key to understanding the tendencies of this new work is the
Internet: the best new work of the last few years has existed as a product of its time.

7
Independent imaginations completing graduate school and/or hitting quarter-life/their
late-twenties now are the first generation to have had access to the Internet during
secondary schooling. With the Internet came an information superhighway so expansive
that it could readily be understood as the New Jersey turnpike of present day. Smith’s
fetishization of the nineteen-fifties’ asphalt road to infinity may have paved the way, but
the Internet has once again made the world feel smaller than ever before, and the amount
of information we can access unfathomable. As an aesthetic impact, the internet has
shifted our sensibility from asphalt to wifi—unlike Eisenhower’s black tops and bridges,
the information super-highway is remarkably immaterial. But what does this mean to a
high school student who Googles the name “Sir Francis Drake?” First of all, it means
instant access to the credits from the 1961 film, the ability to reserve a hotel room in San
Francisco at the click of a button, and naturally, plenty of information about the “Queen’s
Pirate.” It means that in order to navigate the oceans of information on the computer
monitor (millions of search results), one must learn to steer and frame efficiently.

And framers of a sort we have become. And some of us have become Tweeters,
Facebook friends, and Bloggers. And good bloggers have become celebrities: Chicago
suburbanite, style rookie Tavi Gevinson, became a 13-year-old overnight blogosphere
sensation who now holds the international fashion world in the palm of her iPhone. Tavi
has known no life without the Internet, and has known no need for a paper-trail. Despite
the road-blocks of age and geographic locale that would have traditionally prevented a
fashion critic such as Tavi from blossoming, Gevinson has successfully proven the
8
Internet’s uses as both tool for the collection of information, and as tool for the
dissemination of one’s personal archive. The world caught hold of Tavi’s unique vision
of the fashion industry and she soon became a flown-in front-row fixture at shows and
events of note (escorted by her father). I met Tavi and Mr. Gevinson at a 2009 MOCA
benefit after-party in Los Angeles where she played muse-like accessory to L.A. fashion
favorites Kate and Laura Mulleavy, founders of Rodarte. And what happens when a
generation of honed information-framers asserts its first mature creative aspirations into
the world? We’ll soon see; it’s really only just starting to happen. However, if we look to
one half or more of the best new creatives of the last few years that seems to provide an
apt, in-tune, coming attraction, their work tells us that they’ve begun to accept this
massive technological shift and have begun to entrust the framing of their work to an
audience of honed information-aggregators.

As framers we no longer have to be told how to see or experience something, nor do we
want to be. While the best new work may emerge from a background in art (a traditional,
modernist approach), fashion, music, design, architecture, entertainment, or from any
other creative field within popular culture, it lets go of the strict delineations and/or given
forms of its originating field and it generously affords us, its audience, the challenge,
excitement, and pleasure of deciding what it is and whether it buzzes or it doesn’t. In
turn, this new work opens up the possibility for the buzz to be found in works that might
otherwise not be understood as important cultural touchstones: all works (material things
9
and immaterial events, experiences, gestures and assertions), that resonate, move and
stick.

Before I start in with examples of what some of this new work looks like, let’s return
briefly to review the things that this new work doesn’t want to look like. Firstly, this new
work realizes that the contextual limitations of art have come to feel outdated in a
Bluetooth-ready present that is constantly offering up the whole entire world wide web as
an oyster. Thousands of people may see a show at a major museum or read about it in an
art magazine, but the one-minute-long home video “Charlie bit my finger again” has been
viewed over 180 million times on youtube.com. Although it is not, to my knowledge,
intended to be art or high entertainment, or even rub elbows with art or high
entertainment, and aside from the fact that it doesn’t give me a buzz of any kind, this
video is a good example of the potential that exists for hand-crafted media that is made
using consumer devices and distributed online. Traditionally, the art world has been the
most tried-and-true platform for creative experimentation and unique expression, and
clearly this is no longer true.

Likewise, this new work recognizes that art’s oft-morally driven position of criticality
(which has become the commonplace indication of a work’s artness since the foundations
of Conceptual Art were laid down in the 1960’s and the Pictures Generation since built
itself upon them) feels a bit staid. A progenitor and forefather of Robbins’ high-
entertainment, Jeff Koons, whose engagement and marriage to Italian legislator and porn
10
star La Cicciolina, was covered by hundreds of newspapers in thousands of articles
1
,
cautioned in a 1989 interview for Parkett
2
that “Artists somehow develop this moral crisis
where we are fearful of being effective in the world; we were the great seducers, we were
the great manipulators, and we have given up these intrinsic powers of art, its
effectiveness.” What Koons, via Warhol, has laid down through his practice is an
alternative foundation for a career that at moments has been neither restricted within art
nor divorced from art as entertainment. What may have been alienating to young artists
about Koons’ self-promotional genius and moneyed media access twenty years ago is
now par for the course in a culture set to devour Work of Art, a Bravo channel
reality/competition television series that follows the lives of thirteen contemporary artists
competing for a show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. It is no longer necessary for work
to surgically “reveal” (by cutting, slicing, lifting and peeling back) what we’ve already
learned about the way an image works, the way an artwork works, or the way the art
world works. The best new work seems to ask whether it isn’t better suited to seduction
and manipulation.

The independent imaginations behind the best new work seems to make a concerted
attempt at testing the rocky waters out beyond the hermetic world of art and its market.
Likewise, they may take on conflicting, and therefore unfounded roles within it (as art
dealer, for example). At times this new work abandons a sole authorial voice for a

1
Rothkopf, Scott. “Made in Heaven: Jeff Koons and the Invention of the Art Star.” Pop Life: Art in a
Material World. London: Tate, 2009. P. 37.
2
Jack Bankowksy, “Pop Life.” Pop Life: Art in a Material World. London: Tate, 2009. P. 21.

11
collaborative one—or prefers to enact its authorial voice as a parasite, performing the
illusion of submission to a larger power or foundation while surreptitiously asserting
itself in opposition to its host.

Finally, it’s important to note that the best new work goes beyond the blur. Let me
explain: the blur is the fuzzy space where art and popular culture, or art and life become
intertwined. Maintaining a safe and accepted foundation within the context of either art or
popular culture, blurry work can be qualified as artsy culture or popular art. Oftentimes
the art of the blur traffics in elaborate parody. A recent example of this being Paul
McCarthy’s show for Maccarone Gallery in 2007: Peter Paul Chocolates. McCarthy
turned the gallery into a fully functional chocolate factory and retail shop that sold
miniature cast chocolate versions of his iconic Santa with Butt Plug sculpture for $100
each. McCarthy worked within the context of the gallery, positing his “factory” as both a
reference to Andy Warhol’s factory and a critique of art consumption at the height of a
booming economy. A most exciting and unexpected result of all this was the fact that
Maxfield, the uber-chic Melrose Avenue boutique in Los Angeles known for importing
avant-garde Japanese designer clothing to LA in the 1980s, caught wind of the project
and started selling McCarthy’s chocolate Santas for $200. The Santas entered the world
outside the gallery, and McCarthy had effectively blurred lines. Nonetheless, all along,
despite its popular sensibility, he had built this work on the foundation of the art gallery,
and his parody “factory” and parody “product” would therefore forever exist within scare
quotes as such (grammatical reminders of the project’s indebtedness to the white cube,
12
the traditional art context), and within the canonized rubric of Conceptual Art and its
numerous second-cousins, among them: Institutional Critique, Identity Politics, and
Relational Aesthetics. Half or more of the best new work eliminates the scare quotes and
the blur that result from a reliving of these histories, their morals, critiques and
foundations. Instead, it buzzes. The new work is only beginning to find its bearings: its
foundation is not so easily located.

So what, then, does half or more of the best new art look like?

In 2004 when I was living in New York a friend suggested I go check out a show at a
gallery on East Broadway. I saw the show (Seth Price’s first), met the gallery’s
proprietors, realized that there was no actual gallery owner named Reena Spaulings and I
quickly started buzzing. Since 2004, John Kelsey and Emily Sundblad have owned and
operated Reena Spaulings as a commercial contemporary art gallery in lower Manhattan.
To my knowledge, John Kelsey has never publicly called himself an artist (while
Sundblad has referred to herself as such). Aside from his written criticism, Kelsey has
done little work under his given name. He is a member in a different collaborative effort
operating under the name Bernadette Corporation, which created women’s designer
clothing in the mid 1990s, published a novel, had gallery showings, and had work
featured in the pages of art and fashion magazines. Under the name Reena Spaulings,
Kelsey and Sundblad have, in addition to running the gallery, made work and exhibited it
in other art galleries in various cities including New York, London and Brussels. They
13
have also published a screenplay and manufactured Top-Shop style leggings. Kelsey’s
varying projects and associations (past and present) have existed both inside and outside
the context of the art world. While operating within it, in a tradition not divorced from the
early experiments of Dadaism at the Cabaret Voltaire and the silver-skinned walls of
Andy Warhol’s factory, he has consistently proved himself to be a great manipulator of
the art world’s inherited politics. One would be hard-pressed to imagine a culture in
which all gallerists were critics expressing opinions and observations on the pages of
Artforum magazine; remember, the New Museum can’t even exhibit the collection of one
of its trustees without putting up a fight. Kelsey simply performs these varying roles and
moral conflicts-of-interest with nonchalant ease—he breaks one antiquated rule after the
next, never occupying any one position long enough to be categorized. His performance
is also blur-avoiding: Reena Spaulings is not simply a “gallery” disguised as an
“artwork,” or an “artwork” disguised as a “gallery” (although one might certainly enjoy
thinking about it in this respect). Nor is she an artist, or simply a critical look at the
capitalist forces at play in the art world. She is a scare-quote-free commercial force that
makes art, represents artists, fosters their careers and sells their wares at art fairs. What
exactly Kelsey is, or what any of his various incarnations are is a question yet to be
answered. In the spirit of half or more of the best new work, we can frame it all however
we’d like.

In 2006 I was corralled into the life and work of the late Jason Rhoades. Black Pussy
Soirée Cabaret Macramé was a series of ten evening gatherings that Rhoades and I co-
14
hosted in his Historic Pilipinotown studio. We invited guests from varied social cliques
and professional worlds to dine with us, listen to live music (pop and indie), and
participate in the making of Rhoades’ Black Pussy sculptural installation. While related
to art-world precedents as varied as the juried French salons of centuries past to Peggy
Guggenheim’s Art of This Century and Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the soirées
were intended to capture the immaterial charisma of the invited guests as the final
material to complete Rhoades’ sculpture. At the time of my involvement in the soirees I
was too integrated with the project to feel any buzz at all. At each soirée I was preparing
dinner, ushering, socializing, conducting activities and making sure the headlining bands
showed up and that its members were comfortably adjusted in the green room. It wasn’t
until after the final soirée, at a party at the Prada Store in Beverly Hills, that Black Pussy
Soirée Cabaret Macramé made me buzz. I overheard Stefano Tonchi (then editor of T:
The New York Times Style Magazine and currently the editor-in-chief of W Magazine)
chit-chatting with Courtney Love. I heard him ask Love, “You haven’t been to Black
Pussy?” “What’s Black Pussy?” she replied.

Black Pussy Soirée Cabaret Macramé wasn’t an art object or a party. It wasn’t a
nightclub, an orgy or a show. It was some combination of all of these things and
something entirely all its own (check out its MySpace page). Rhoades orchestrated the
soirées so that they would exist outside the immediate context of the known commercial
art world. Paradoxically, he founded the Johnny Cash Gallery as the soirée antechamber:
a commercial gallery that ran on its own absurd mission to force patrons to pay some part
15
of any purchase in cash (the Johnny Cash Gallery actually operated under these terms and
conditions—I know because I once had to meet up with a collector who partook and take
a pile of cash off of his hands). Like the Johnny Cash Gallery, Black Pussy Soirée
Cabaret Macramé was constructed out of cryptic language and rituals that made little
sense and were difficult (but not impossible) to explain. These explanations involved
touchy matters of middle-eastern politics and blatant frat-house racism and misogyny.
What became clear the night of the Prada party was that all of Rhoades’ efforts to
differentiate, alienate and sabotage his work resulted in the creation of something beyond
traditional categorization, something that in some respects was radically unframed.
Stories about the soirées would take on lives of their own as manifested in the
conversation I overheard between a fashion editor and a grunge rocker in which the word
“art” was never mentioned. Black Pussy is simply Black Pussy; it is some of the best new
work.

Perhaps the quiet revolution of Reena Spaulings is yet to be fully understood, and
perhaps a full understanding of the contributions of Black Pussy Soirée Cabaret
Macramé, although aided as such things are by the finality of Rhoades’ tragic death,
remains imminent. Perhaps both of these examples may only provide a blueprint for what
the best new art can be—Reena Spaulings operating as a hub for multiple simultaneous
and anonymous practices, and Black Pussy, operating as a social network—these projects
may on the one hand step transgressively out of bounds, while on the other they elect to
remain umbilically tethered to the gallery and to its history. How then to cut this cord?
16

What’s required of an independent imagination is patience. In 2009 the Hollywood actor
James Franco took up a short residency on the long-running soap-opera General
Hospital. Franco’s gesture may have something to do with some of the best new work of
the last few years. His effort has come close, but hasn’t given me anything to buzz about,
at least not yet. It’s only natural that some new work might not buzz for its audiences the
first time that it’s encountered. It could effectively buzz for some of them later on down
the road, or for some maybe never. Without a clear and understood foundation, this best
new work isn’t easy to recognize and digest, and the armies of honed framers to whom it
is most-closely-connected generationally is only just now visible out in the distance on
the horizon. In Franco’s case, simple impatience has gotten the best of him.

Just after his General Hospital residency ended, Franco immediately penned an op-ed in
The Wall Street Journal as an attempt to thoroughly frame the guest-spot as a
performance artwork. He wrote of his appearance on the show “I disrupted the audience's
suspension of disbelief, because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to
be perceived as something that doesn't belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap
operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-
up world. In performance art, the outcome is uncertain-and this was no exception. My
hope was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from
entertainment that is considered critically legitimate.” Franco’s writing denied his work
the opportunity to speak for itself, to be framed by its audience. As an unexplained and
17
uncanny television moment it may have resonated, provoked questions, and elicited
exactly the reaction he had hoped for over time—it may have buzzed. Because of his
haste to categorize, frame, name, and contextualize it, it most certainly has not. His
attempt at self-mythology has only served to demystify his work. No formula can create
buzz.

18
Conclusion

I’ve buzzed for the art of Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Cady Noland. I’ve buzzed for the
music of The Beach Boys and Michael Jackson and the writing of Joan Didion and Bret
Easton Ellis, for the choreography of Michael Jordan and for the emotional complexities
of The Hills. I’ve buzzed for Reena Spaulings, Black Pussy Soirée Cabaret Macramé and
the Hollywood Greyhound Bus Station. I’ve never buzzed for Colbie Caillat or “Charlie
bit my finger again” or McCarthy’s chocolate Santas.

Embracing half or more of the best new work may feel like a trap at first. It may seem
like a ploy to open up the floodgates and let any old thing, experience, gesture or
assertion be held in too high an esteem. It may seem like a dangerous game set on
eliminating distinctions of hierarchical quality, like a step in the direction of a total
critical chaos or anarchy: after all, anyone can frame anything however he or she would
like. What we have to remember is that the best new work, like anything else, commands
interest, and does not demand a consensus opinion. That certain works will buzz and
certain works will not is a given. Kelsey and Sundblad and Rhoades’ works have made
me buzz but Franco’s work did not.

I’m always looking and framing. I’m getting better and better at finding these moving,
resonant experiences, and I’m getting more and more confident in making subjective
19
statements about where I find them and what they are. I encourage you to do the same—
let’s see what we find. In LA, wearing sunglasses helps a lot.

20
Bibliography

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a Material World. London: Tate, 2009. Print.

Caillat, Colbie. Bubbly. Universal Republic Music, 2007. MP3.

Charlie Bit My Finger - Again! Perf. Charlie and Harry. YouTube.com. 22 May 2007.
Web.

Chen, Adrian. "James Franco's General Hospital Appearance Was Subversive
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DiVello, Adam, prod. "The Hills." The Hills. MTV. 2006-10. Television.

Franco, James. "A Star, a Soap and the Meaning of Art." The Wall Street Journal [New
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Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum, vol. 5, no. 8 (April 1967): 12-23. Print.

Gevinson, Tavi. Web log post. The Style Rookie. Web.

Guns ‘N Roses. Welcome to the Jungle. Perf. Guns 'N Roses. Geffen Records, 1987.
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Israel, Alex, ed. Jason Rhoades' Black Pussy Cocktail Coffee Table Book. Germany:
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Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Arts Yearbook 8 (New York: Art Digest, 1965): 74-82.
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Leckey, Mark. Cinema in the Round. Perf. Mark Leckey. 2007. DVD.

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis attempts to both illustrate and explain how the specific, given conditions of a time and place inform an art practice. This thesis, however, does not consider a moment in the historical past, and is not buoyed by the wisdom and hindsight of history. Rather, the thesis demands that the time at hand is now and that the setting to consider is its author’s personal daily experience in and around Los Angeles, California. While the first chapter of the thesis looks into the recent past to tell a story about a moment of profound discovery for the author, a moment that occurred in 2008 in Hollywood, California, the second chapter is a proposition about the changing nature of contemporary art practice today. It references specific artists and their recent or current projects, as well as current events, parallel practices, technologies and phenomena.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Israel, Alexander (author)

Core Title To be determined

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Fine Arts

Publication Date 08/08/2010

Defense Date 08/05/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag buzz,California,framing,freeway eyewear,Greyhound bus station,Hollywood,Internet,L.A. rays,Los Angeles,OAI-PMH Harvest,Sunglasses

Place Name California (states), Hollywood (city or populated place), Los Angeles (city or populated place)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor White, Charles (committee chair), Hainley, Bruce (committee member), Leavitt, William (committee member), Lockhart, Sharon (committee member)

Creator Email alex@freewayeyewear.com,surrealex@aol.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3346

Unique identifier UC179994

Identifier etd-Israel-3994 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-376409 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3346 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Israel-3994.pdf

Dmrecord 376409

Document Type Thesis

Rights Israel, Alexander

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu