Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself. In homage to an influence in his early career, McCarthy attempted to reconstruct a pair of pants worn by Black Panther revolutionary Eldridge Cleaver in a picture that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s. But in the process, McCarthy misremembered their original design of the pants, which had black outer panels and white inner panels in white, and left a black shape highlighted in the crotch area. Instead, McCarthy’s reconstruction divides the pants vertically in two black and white sections. McCarthy’s mistake speaks not only of the fallibility of memory but of a certain kind of queerness that resists any categorical—“black or white”—definition. Memory Mistake ’s use of aesthetic formalism, error, subjectivity, and social history can be seen to challenge the tropes of modernism and art history.
Known for his transgressive performance art pieces that often challenge social conventions, Paul McCarthy is undoubtedly one of the main figures in the West Coast contemporary art scene. Using different forms from pop culture as source material, McCarthy casts a critical look at American society and consumerism. With a particularly poignant sense humor, his works also investigate the intricacies of human psychology.
Julio Cesar Morales’s watercolor drawings, Undocumented Intervention , show a variety of surprising hiding places assumed by people trying to cross into the United States without documentation...
For Untitled, Caesar encased recycled objects such as scraps of plywood, paper or cloth in resin and then cut and reassembled the pieces into abstract forms...
Untitled (Wall Street’s Chosen Few…) is typical of Pettibon’s drawings in which fragments of text and image are united, but yet gaps remain in their signification...
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form...
Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters...
Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site...
Chris Johanson’s paintings, sculptures, and installations break down everyday scenes and commonplace dramas into colorful forms; the darkest sides of humanity are invoked with humor...
Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light...
The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition...
Unlike many of his earlier films which often present poignant critiques of mass media and its deleterious effects on American culture, EASTER MORNING , Conner’s final video work before his death in 2008, constitutes a far more meditative filmic essay in which a limited amount of images turn into compelling, almost hypnotic visual experience...
The Simpson Verdict is a three-minute animation by Kota Ezawa that portrays the reading of the verdict during the OJ Simpson trial, known as the “most publicized” criminal trial in history...
Welling employs simple materials like crumpled aluminum foil, wrinkled fabric and pastry dough and directly exposes them as photograms, playing with the image in the process of revealing it...