L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Sometimes, an artist strikes a chord with his contemporaries, and affection for him ripples through culture more distinctly and effusively than anything he’s actually made.  Paul Thek was that kind of artist, perhaps better suited to being a muse than to having one. Homages began coming his way before he’d cleared thirty-five[.....]

This week, the Christian Marclay: Festival will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. The exhibition celebrates many of the artist’s graphic scores for performance and will take the form of multiple daily performances by individual musicians and vocalists. The Whitney has pulled together some of country’s finest Avant-garde musicians to play more than a dozen of Marclay’s scores dated[.....]

This past weekend, the art world took a collective breath as it was informed of the death of a titan, French-American artist Louise Bourgeois. At the age of 98, Bourgeois had accomplished an impressive sixty-year career which, at the time of her death, was continuing to gain momentum. Bourgeois was born December 25, 1911 in Paris, France where her artistic career started as a young[.....]

Drew Heitzler rephrases history in ways that seem both furtive and strangely revealing. In his most recent work, he culls characters, settings, and plots from the visual history of the still-young Los Angeles. Rearranging and re-imagining three films from the early 1960s, all of them productions in which the rebel spirit of Easy Rider seems to be slowly eating into the stylized melodrama of noir,[.....]