L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child,” Norman Mailer infamously remarked in 1971, less than one year before Arbus died and over nine years after she snapped a photo of a scrawny blond boy who actually did have grenade in hand.[.....]

As Susan Sontag observed, “the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads”. Pure Satire by Maleonn at the 2902 Gallery in Singapore encapsulates this visual aesthetic, creating an open set of performative statements within a symbol-laden, dreamlike universe that amalgamates historical and contemporary trends, wherein protagonists are children with[.....]

In a former life, Walead Beshty may have rubbed elbows with Patti Smith. Flaunting her contemptuous disregard for the cautionary advice of her peers, Smith famously denounced words as mere “rules and regulations” in her rendition of Van Morrison’s “Gloria.” In one unruly, titillating performance, Smith flipped the good ol’ boys’ fraternity of rock and roll on its ear by lampooning the muffled sexism of[.....]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Last night, at a bar beneath a Motel 8 on Sunset and Western, a friend and I got sucked into a great, mammoth of a Jukebox that’s quirky selection reminded us of a history short enough that our lives had overlapped with much of it, but long enough that many of the[.....]

One offshoot of photography is the debate over the authority we give it, a fact that San Francisco artist Sean McFarland plays with in Viewshed, a solo show up this month at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions.  Viewshed contains two separate but related bodies of work: Dark Pictures, a series of large, extremely dark but detailed photographs taken of what look like wild and wooded landscapes; and[.....]

One might be tempted to call Lisa Tan’s exhibition at Arthouse in Austin poetic. But what would this mean? It is spare, filled with layered and complex allusions, much like a poem. The imagistic lyricism of two finches in a cage; a lone man smoking as he stares out a window; flashes of barren mountain peaks; and a doctor’s stark appraisal of an aging body[.....]

With a broad mix of photographs from both unknown shutterbugs and internationally recognized artists, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870 at SFMOMA examines the images of a culture existing in an uneasy relationship to the camera. The exhibition probes our social connection to surveillance, pornography, and physical and emotional violence. Last week, Daily Serving’s Bean Gilsdorf sat down with Senior Curator of Photography[.....]