Remembering Janice Lowry Gothold
My Janice moment: Early in the morning at the Gypsy Den, getting some coffee for my chica. She approaches me and says she loves my work. She knows I'm not much into art (she must've seen some article I wrote with my stock response: Art ends for me at Norman Rockwell, R. Crumb, and Jose Guadalupe Posada), but nevertheless insists that I take a reproduction of one of her journals. It stays inside my mailbox for months until I finally read it. Couldn't put it down--personal mixed with gorgeous, inventive art. Just like Janice.
Her memorial service is this Saturday at 2 p.m. at the Episcopal Church of the Messiah, 614 N. Bush St., SanTana. In lieu of flowers, Janice's family suggests donating to the wonderful Taller San Jose, a program near to Janice's heart. Her husband Jon tells us he will continue to update her website at janicelowry.com. Finally, a clip of Janice:





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Larry Fodor's work can be hard to defend. When people carp about "modern art," when they talk about canvases full of smears and glops and they holler, "a chimp could have painted that," they're probably thinking of art like Fodor's. Even if you're proud to call yourself an artsy-fartsy weirdo, a little of this kind of art goes a long way.
The Orange County Museum of Art's 2008 Biennial features twenty exhibits beyond the museum itself, scattered all the way from San Francisco down to Tijuana. Einar and Jamex de la Torre's "Pho’zole 2008," at South Coast Plaza's Orange Lounge, seems weirdly symbolic of the Biennial itself, offering up so many bowls of food that it would probably take the rest of your life to eat it all. The bowls are mounted on the wall, wrong way out, so the food looks like it's about to come dribbling out and land on your shoes with a wet splat. On their own and placed on a table the way a sensible person would do it, any one or two of these colorful meals might look tasty. But clustered together in one vertiginous sprawl like this, the effect is anything but appetizing. (Actually, it feels sort of like you've been swallowed by a hungry giant and you're trapped in his stomach with his last few dozen undigested meals.) As if all of this wasn't already unsettling enough, the de la Torres brothers have also included a video of people talking about food around the world; the video is embedded in the wall, and shines eerily through a pile of semi-transparent chow like the dream of a glutton sleeping off his latest binge. The food court's just a short walk away. Hungry?
Sofa, King, Cool, Travis Collinson's memorably peculiar acrylic painting, really doesn't belong in the Huntington Beach Art Center's baseball-themed art show, "2332." But then again, an argument could be made that Collinson's hapless characters would be misfits pretty much anywhere.
Roger Weik's Abstract Number 73 looks like any number of horrible things. Maybe a close-up view of a mummy's back, with jaundiced, rotting flesh peeking through the frayed, graying bandages. Or maybe it's more like some sort of a huge, nasty insect nest you'd find inside of a hollowed-out tree. If you were refurbishing an old house and you ripped open one of the walls, you might be distressed to discover something that looked a lot like this: dirty, spongy stuff covered with stringy bits of some kind of rotting fabric.
Andrew Holder seems to live in a cheery 1968 wonderland; it's as if he went to see Yellow Submarine when he was seven years old and he never left Pepperland again. His work features bright, lysergic colors and bold, flat, graphic designs... Making it all the more arresting when his stuff lurches off of the walls of the Hibbleton gallery and into the third dimension, as it does in his mounted, Trophy Deer Heads covered with what we can only describe as psychedelic tattoos. The papier mache deer have no visible eyes or mouths, but the designs crawling across their necks and faces are alive with head-trippy details. Bustling little towns play host to giant animals - a pair of geese the size of skyscrapers wander through, and nobody seems to mind. A turtle as big as a luxury yacht splashes lazily along on a winding river. Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream...
Robert Rauschenberg was one of the great pranksters of the art world, with a punk rock, wiseguy attitude decades ahead of his time. He got noticed in a big way when he purchased a drawing by de Kooning just so he could erase it. Throughout his career Rauschenberg loved to blur the line between art and garbage, turning art into garbage (as he did with poor de Kooning's work) and turning garbage into art (as he did with old bicycles, newspapers and other cast-offs he happened upon.) For a group show of portraits of gallery owner Iris Clert, Rauschenberg sent a telegram that really said it all about his approach to art: "This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so." In a time when many artists and critics were spinning their wheels trying to figure out what art was, Rauschenberg's guiding principle - "It's art because I say so" - served him surprisingly well.




