Today we continue our week-long series, Summer of Utopia, through the work of artists Rosa Casado and Mike Brookes. Spanish performance artist, Rosa Casado and British visual artist, Mike Brookes initiated a long-term collaboration in 2000 focusing on performative engagements in social spaces,  informed by seminal works addressing utopian ideals of social equality,  self-organization and ecological sustainability. In Paradise 2 – the incessant sound of[.....]

Today, DailyServing continues our 7-day summer series, Summer of Utopia, where we investigate seven different artists who either employ or interrupt ideas of utopia. Full disclosure: Ted Purves was the first person I met at the California College of the Arts and—despite the fact that I don’t work in relational aesthetics—one of the reasons I decided to apply to their graduate program.  He is the[.....]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley At the start of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote’s charming novella about a troubled socialite looking for “what’s hers” and attracted to everything that’s not, the unnamed narrator receives a message from a bartender named Joe Bell. He meets Bell, an old friend, and the two clandestinely talk about Holly, the socialite[.....]

The work of Slovakian artist Roman Ondák has been referred to as “intervention,” a label which makes reference to the way a piece confronts the viewer with an unexpected experience. Ondák, who is currently participating in the Berlin Biennale through August 8, 2010, creates work that is at once mischievous, hilarious and stone serious. He deals with social issues of both the grand and trivial[.....]

In the 1988 action film, Die Hard, John McClane (played by Bruce Willis) hustles around a Los Angeles skyscraper—sweat-soaked and shirtless—in an effort to save his wife and other hostages from a ruthless terrorist group. At various points throughout the film, McClane (an NYPD officer) survives a partial jump from an exploding building and smashes through a plate glass window. Basically, he is injured to[.....]

Nostalgia is a word that means “a wistful desire to return” or “a sentimental yearning,” but from these cloying definitions one would never guess that the word originally meant “homesickness”. At its heart, Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York is nostalgic, but it is also complex and engaging without a hint of the saccharine. Nostalgia as homesickness is the distant light[.....]

Marc Horowitz, a self-described “maximalist,” has permeated American culture with his socially-oriented projects and playful enterprises. His work includes video, drawing, cultural experiments, and the dynamic use of networks like twitter and youtube. In 2004, while working as a photo assistant for Crate & Barrel, Horowitz wrote “Dinner w/ Marc 510-872-7326″ on a dry erase board that was included in their fall catalog. He received[.....]