Hustler of Culture

Christian Mendoza "Indelible Light Mechanism"

Another beautiful process video by artist, Chris Mendoza!

MOCAtv's The Underbelly Project - Walk Through

I hope to see this artwork someday. From MOCAtv:

In 2009 the Underbelly Project project began four stories underneath the skin of New York.

For 100 years, a massive subway station sat unfinished, unused, undiscovered.

Over the course of a year, artists were secretly escorted into that station to leave their creative mark.

Unobstructed by the pressures of commercial sales, email or daily routines, each artist painted for one full night.

The original entrance has since been removed and darkness has reclaimed the station. It has become an elusive pirate treasure of contemporary art.

The Underbelly Project

Subscribe to MOCAtv + Join MOCA Los Angeles

If you subscribe to MOCAtv, you will receive a FREE three month museum membership to MOCA Los Angeles. LA peeps, don't sleep on this!

"Gloam"

Love the music. The tone. The darkness. Somebody please give David Elwell and Gareth Hughes money. I want to see what they can do with a longer format. [THANKS Creators Project for sharing!]

MOCAtv is Live!

MOCA has launched the first and only dedicated contemporary art channel to be part of YouTube Original Channels:

The Museum of Contemporary Art presents MOCAtv, a new contemporary art video channel for the expanding, international, online audience interested in visual culture. Developed as a digital extension of the museum’s education and exhibition programming, MOCAtv is the first and only dedicated art channel to be part of YouTube’s original channels announced October 2011, and is part of YouTube Education, a collection of more than 700,000 videos on a wide range of educational topics from math to science, history to geography. Views of educational content on YouTube more than doubled during 2011 and in just the last year, the number of subscribers to YouTube’s educational channels also more than doubled. MOCAtv will add curated and original videos to inform, educate and engage this global, interactive audience about contemporary art and its intersection with film, video, music, performance, dance, music, comedy, and more.

The YouTube Curated By Chris Johanson clip is one of many videos I'm excited about. So stoked for the upcoming programming.Tune in... art is for everyone, especially you!

"A Love Letter For You" by Joey Garfield with ESPO/Stephen Powers

My pal, Joey's film, A LOVE LETTER FOR YOU launches today! Starring the talented and funny as fuck street artist Stephen ESPO Powers, the documentary chronicles Powersʼ Love Letter Project for the Mural Arts Program in West Philadelphia. I've seen project pictures online for years. Now, I am so excited to download and watch the film. I hope you are too!

Support the arts! Support friends! A Love Letter For You is now available on iTunes.

SF - "Special Delivery Bay Area 2012" (09.08.12)

Special Delivery Bay Area 2012 Trailer from Mapache Films on Vimeo.

Video: Shot and Edited by Mapache Films

Audio: "Biata Waves" by Dre Burgos soundcloud.com/burrito-2

More info: Special Delivery

Michael Andrews "Bubbles In Space"

Michael Andrews - Bubbles In Space from Josh Hassin on Vimeo.

What a bad ass music/art collab by young people. LOVE:

Over 100 high school students drew 3000+ frames for this new video for the new single “Bubbles In Space” by Michael Andrews. His full album "Spilling a Rainbow" comes out on Everloving records Aug. 2012.

Wall Writers: Graffiti in its Innocence

Roger Gastman's working on a film. I put my money where my mouth is and supported it. Why? Because I believe Wall Writers: Graffiti in its Innocence is an important movie that needs to be made. Here's what the art impresario had to say about it:

Wall Writers: Graffiti in its Innocence, 1967-1972. When art became a democracy and self-promotion became an art.

I never set out to make this documentary. I was doing research for a book I put out last year “The History of American Graffiti” and I became fascinated with the true beginnings of modern graffiti. So many graffiti writers my co-author and I talked to claimed they were the first to do it. That they did “this in 1969” or what ever year. If you did the math to how old they were the year they were claiming it just wasn't true. I set out to find the truth. 

Once I started digging up these early graffiti writers in New York City and Philadelphia, many who had not been talked to or had thought about graffiti in over 30 years I figured I better film them! Who knows if they will disappear again or not want to talk about graffiti again! The more people I interviewed and filmed the more I started to realize we had something special. A true “moment in time” that told the history of modern graffiti, something that has become the worlds fastest growing art movement. 

Over 20 people were interviewed to make the film, some of them include: TAKI183, COCO144, SNAKE1, PHIL T GREEK, SJK 171, MIKE 171, WICKED GARY, ROCKY 184, HENRY 161, COWBOY, UNDERTAKER ASH, CORNBREAD, KOOL KLEPTO KID, JOE 182, THE JOKER, LAZAR, BAMA and more. 

We turned over every rock we could. Looked through every archive you could think of and we dug up some amazing photos and archive footage to help tell the story. FREEDOM aka Chris Pape helped produce and write the film, Ikey Owens (The Mars Volta is one of the many bands he has been a part of) came on and did the score. One of my art icons and amazing filmmaker John Waters did the voice over! 

We have a 58 minute near finished film that I personally think is awesome and so do the people that have seen it. I have invested countless time and more money then I would care to admit into this project. Now I ask for assistance in getting it out there to the world. I need to acquire the rights too much of the archival footage and cover the costs of post production. Also I would like to do a weekend showing of the film in NY and LA before Wall Writers goes out for general distribution. 

If you are a fan of graffiti, street art or subculture in general this is an educational film you must see. Please help make it a reality. It’s so close!

Thank You X "Boy Wonder"

Everyone's got Batman fever these days. I've always liked Robin more.

Check out Thank You X's newest print, "Boy Wonder". It's a hand screened, spray painted print on gallery paper and limited to an edition of 40. Each print is hand signed and numbered and no two prints are alike.

Road Trip USA by Menassier Gabriel

Road Trip USA from Menassier Gabriel ///mg image on Vimeo.

I love road trips. I love zig-zagging across America so much, I finished three cross country road trips a decade ago. Now that I have Lulu, I'm dying to take her to some of my favorite places in America -- Monument Valley, Moab, and other national parks. This video makes me want to hit the road again! [Thanks, Kathryn!]

NYC - The VICE x Westway Summer Fling #2 | Chief Performs | People Who Just Had Sex Screening (07.26.12)

Blade Runner Aquarelle Edition, Part 1 (Teaser)

Beautiful! I definitely want to see more. Love this aesthetic. [Thanks Tommy!]

LA - Aaron Rose's Fire Sale (07.07.12 - 07.21.12)

Das Tunnel | Transmission LA: AV Club

A short clip about Transmission LA: AV CLUB at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA running from April 20, 2012 to May 6, 2012. More info:

The Avant/Garde Diaries presents Transmission LA: AV CLUB, curated by Mike D, an interdisciplinary festival featuring the work of 16 contemporary artists, musicians, designers, filmmakers, and chefs, including Peter Coffin, Jim Drain, Will Fowler, Benjamin Jones, Mike Mills, Takeshi Murata, and Tom Sachs. The presentation will include the international debut of the Mercedes-Benz Concept Style Coupé and an evening concert and DJ series featuring performances by many special guests, including Santigold.

The 17-day festival will illustrate how audio and visual art forms complement and influence each other, through various exhibitions, concerts, DJ nights, performances, and installations,. The event’s logo embodies Mike D’s artistic concept, depicting the letters A (for audio) and V (for visual) as inextricably fused.

Enjoy this look at Transmission LA: AV Club coming to life at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA.More info at http://www.theavantgardediaries.com and http://moca.org

Directed by: Joe Termini
Produced by: Joe Termini
Principal Photographer: Matt Mimiaga
Edited by: Joey Indrieri

Cai Guo-Qiang's Mystery Circle: Explosion Event for MOCA, LA Recap

We secured front row seats shared by the press corps, for Cai Guo-Qiang's highly anticipated Mystery Circle: Explosion Event for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Lulu waited patiently. I waited anxiously.

More about Mystery Circle from MOCA:

Mystery Circle, a site-specific work created for MOCA, will contain four stages of special pyrotechnics. At the moment of ignition, 40,000 firework rockets will form a string of crop circles and launch perpendicular to MOCA’s north wall, toward Temple Street, before falling onto the ground. Amidst a curtain of smoke, approximately 100 spinning pyrotechnic UFOs will sporadically appear from the parking lot grounds, while an imaginary alien-god figure on the left side of the wall is outlined from bottom to top by gunpowder fuses. When the burned fuses reach the “halo” of the figure, mini Titanium Salute rockets will shoot into the air followed by a grand finale. The rockets will create a burned imprint on the museum wall, leaving an outdoor drawing. While Cai’s signature explosion events, Project for Extraterrestrials, have been dedicated to creatures from outer space, his new project at MOCA will be the first time an imaginary alien figure actually appears.

Plenty of Angelenos showed up for the post-sunset fireworks show. 

After much anticipation, the time finally arrived! We experienced Guo-Qiang's site-specific work created for MOCA up close. Maybe too close. When the first humongous explosion ignited, everybody screamed because they were simultaneously scared and excited. People generally expect fireworks to explode in the air, vertically. At blast off, we experienced a wall of 40,000 firework rockets with full visual, auditory, and olfactory senses dialed up on overdrive. Not to mention the heatwave that followed. The spectacle lasted only a minute but it had the crowd chattering all night long. It was an amazing, amazing, amazing event to experience.

[I have a full unedited three minute video too.]

The imaginary alien figure appears on the smoldering firework wall.

After the outdoor exhibition, we toured Guo-Qiang's first west coast solo museum exhibition, "Sky Ladder". Upon seeing this crop circle piece, Lulu pointed excitedly and yelled, "The carpet is on the ceiling!" This made me laugh.

The rest of the evening was spent dreaming about the explosions in the sky.

Visit The Museum of Contemporary Art before July 30, 2012 to view Cai Guo-Qiang's "Sky Ladder".

LA - "Shoah" Screening (03.26.12 + 03.27.12)

 

HAMMER SCREENINGS: SHOAH

The Hammer Museum presents a two-night screening of Shoah (1985) on Monday, March 26 at 7pm and Tuesday, March 27 at 7pm in the Billy Wilder Theater.

An extraordinary film...One of the noblest ever made. It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness. —Roger Ebert

Shoah is one of the greatest documentaries in the history of the cinema…you must see it. —New York Magazine

Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s monumental epic on the Holocaust, features interviews with survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators in 14 countries. The film does not contain any historical footage but rather features interviews that seek to remember the Jewish tragedy and revisits places where the crimes took place. (1985, Dir. Claude Lanzmann, First Era: 273 min. Second Era: 230 min. total: 503 min.)

In conjunction with the exhibition Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972.

Phil Frost On The Inspiration Of Bob Marley

Phil Frost is an artist's artist. He taught Shepard how to wheat paste. He is legend. To get to peek his studio, I want to weep (can you tell I ♥ him)?! More about this clip:

In celebration of the upcoming release of MARLEY, Kevin Macdonald's epic feature length documentary on the life of Bob Marley, artist Phil Frost (who's known to be incredibly reclusive) participated in an terrific short video in which he for the first time talks about how his work and life has been influenced by Marley. MARLEY hits theaters and all the digital outlets (including Facebook) on 4/20 and includes never before seen footage and music.

"Elephant Safaris--Into the Wilds" by Eames Demetrios

Several of Lulu's beloved Eames elephant cousins are going on a safari! Here's what the Eames Office had to say about it:

If you enjoyed the epic A Gathering of Elephants from a few years ago, Eames Demetrios, director of the Eames Office, has made another Elephant movie, this time animated on location in South Africa, at Mala Mala Game Reserve outside Kruger National Park.

The stop-motion film is a joy to watch and an adventure worth experiencing. I loved the zebra crossing. And chilling with the water buffalos. Where will the herd go next?! Somewhere fun, no doubt!

BEGINNINGS by JR

French artist JR was busy posting up new vids on YouTube this week. Here's another clip documenting his early years from 2000 - 2003.