art so cal-find observe describe

This blog is an overview and streets eye view of art in Southern California.  It is not a report on business as usual but on artists and exhibitions which seem to be illuminating new terrain and laying down new tracks through the artistic landscape.  So often a viewer is confronted with art  which seems odd, arbitrary, and to be on view only due to arcane, presumptuous marketing concerns.   In many  cases this is the case.  The  situation though is always in change and in a few cases an artist is through the improbable contingencies, half steps , faints and various other path opening strategies  trying to  lead a viewer off the track of conventional thinking and into a multi-layered appreciation of our cultural  present.   As a general template these works on first "run through" in a viewers mind  lack in some fundamental way.  Their way of being not there is a clue to the fact that what is being discussed is off the map.  Thus is begun the process of placing the work in the world.  This is a process which in the process expands both work and world.  In broad brush strokes cultural context is what is at stake.  Everything and nothing in so much as there is no set measure .   Work and world co inform each other.  Criticism  at its essence is  a system of discussion that forwards this process