Greetings, fellow earthlings. I even have been running around Monterrey, Mexico, eating and drinking every little thing in sight. And I’m gonna keep the party going as I reenter the SoCal atmosphere, because this week our food team published their guide to the 101 Best Restaurants in L.A. I’m Carolina A. Miranda, art and design columnist on the Los Angeles Times, and I come bearing essential arts and tacos dorados:
Getting monumental
Wandering the streets of Monterrey’s Barrio Antiguo (the old colonial district), I used to be struck by a series of plaques commemorating popular ghost tales and supernatural legends.
One tells the story of an enigmatic doll with an uncanny smile that was present in a box, together with a letter in a language nobody could decipher. One other tells the story of a lady who was followed by the town priest right into a cemetery — and when he arrived, he found only a tomb along with her name. Yet one more marks the story of a bishop who mysteriously appeared to pay a poor family’s debt then disappeared, never to be seen again.
I used to be intrigued by this not only because I grew up with loads of ghost stories. (One among my Peruvian aunts was renowned for her premonitions of death.) But because, at a moment through which monument makers in the USA are reconsidering the ways through which monuments are erected and to whom, it represents an intriguing way of publicly marking intangible heritage reminiscent of folk tales.
All of this was on my mind as I popped into the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (referred to as MARCO) to ascertain out a show of labor by the Mexican sculptor Helen Escobedo. The artist, who died in 2010 on the age of 76, is maybe best known for her monumental public sculptures and installations. This includes the nearly 50-foot-long “Coatl,” 1980, composed of a colourful series of torquing frames, that’s permanently installed within the sculpture garden on the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City.
“Helen Escobedo: Total Environments,” because the MARCO show is titled, covers the breadth of her work: from her early monumental pieces, fabricated in materials like steel, to later works that embodied a more transient materiality, reminiscent of mesh and detritus. “Los Mojados,” made within the last 12 months of her life, reflects on the crisis along the border and is produced from an easy arrangement of translucent raincoats placed on gently trembling wires. It’s unnervingly spectral.
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But I discovered myself reveling in a series of wry collages that Escobedo made within the early ’80s of imagined monuments. This included monuments to breast milk and childhood. A monument to classicism featured the large head of an ancient Greek sculpture in a pubic plaza (in proportions suggestive of the huge heads of the Olmec). Amongst my favorites: her monument to the cigarette, featuring a single smoke standing like an obelisk in a city street, recalling all of the loosies I purchased in college, and one other to the “gran taco” — because if there’s anything that Netflix’s “Taco Chronicles” has proven over and yet again, it’s that poetry is present in a tortilla.
I’m especially intrigued by the humor with which Escobedo approached the topic. Monuments might be dead serious and dead earnest, since so a lot of them commemorate war and death. She imagined a world through which we built fewer monuments to men and more to concepts that give us pleasure, nourishment, joy.
It’s not an idea without precedent.
In a 1989 book titled “Mexican Monuments: Strange Encounters,” published in collaboration with photographer Paolo Gori, Escobedo offers a casual study of Mexican monuments. There are taxonomies of the nice civic markers: heroic figures on plinths and plentiful giant heads. But additionally receiving ample space within the book are monuments that lean into the favored and the strange — reminiscent of a statuary tribute to the bandit Jesús Malverde (a patron saint of narco traffickers) in Chihuahua or the monument to an octopus in Veracruz.
Amongst my favorites is the Cozumel monument featuring a giant shrimp sitting on a structure that resembles a Roman aqueduct. The caption reads: “Delicious with fresh lime juice, superb in bronze.”
The book, like her collages, is rife with deadpan humor. It also offers one other way of taking a look at monuments — one which expands the ways through which we predict in regards to the figures we honor inside a city’s landscape. “Why not solid a fresh have a look at all of the effigies you could have taken as a right inside your individual vicinity?” she writes within the foreword. “Seek for those others, the strange ones that could be there, or sadly, may not.”
Essentially the most meaningful monument ultimately often is the easy plaque that honors the neighborhood ghost.
“Helen Escobedo: Total Environments” is on view on the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey through January; Zuazua and Jardón S/N, City Center, Monterrey, marco.org.mx.
Within the galleries
In painter Henry Taylor‘s solo show at MOCA — “Henry Taylor: B Side” — art critic Christopher Knight finds work that “pumps life into the static picture plane.” Taylor is sometimes called a portraitist, since individuals are his most frequent subject, but Knight sees something deeper in his work: “He approaches painting as a social endeavor — lively representation, not passive, which portraiture normally demands.”
ICYMI: my portrait of Taylor in words.
“Gorgeous, funny, lush and disturbing, all at the identical time.” Jonathan Griffin considers Kaari Upson‘s recent show at Sprüth Magers — a show that she conceived of in life, but which ultimately ended up being a posthumous exhibition within the wake of her premature death.
Plus, contributor Samanta Helou Hernandez has an important piece about Maria Maea, an artist who deploys the town’s ubiquitous palms in her work. “Plants have a body, we mimic it, it mimics us,” Maea says of the ways she uses nature to evoke other forms. “I’ll use corn as a spine and folks recognize it because we’re mirrors of nature.”
On and off the stage
Pacific Resident Theatre has resuscitated a one-act play by Edward Albee that’s so infrequently produced that theater critic Charles McNulty had never seen or read it prior to this staging. “Fam and Yam” was last produced in L.A. in 1978 as a part of a series of one-acts directed by the playwright himself. Now it appears as a prelude to Harold Pinter’s “The Dumb Waiter” — to which it serves as an “intriguing appetizer,” writes McNulty. Why has this play remained under wraps for thus long? McNulty has some theories about why that’s.
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“KPOP,” which made history on Broadway as the primary musical centered on Korean popular culture, will close after just 17 regular performances. The Times’ Ashley Lee speaks with composer Helen Park, book author Jason Kim and producers Tim Forbes and Joey Parnes about what they think went mistaken. “Whether we prefer it or not,” says Park, “telling a up to date Asian story remains to be a risk.”
The story of singer Pat Benatar and musician-songwriter Neil Giraldo‘s romance served as a degree of inspiration for a jukebox musical titled “Invincible,” on view on the Wallis, which can also be inspired by Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” in addition to one other unofficial jukebox musical, written by Bradley Bredeweg, that drew from Benatar’s music for a star-crossed-lovers narrative. The show, reports The Times’ Jessica Gelt, is flush with diverse characters and is about in a post-apocalyptic twenty first century Verona. Says Benatar, “It’s form of cool to be collaborating with Shakespeare.”
Shakespeare may feel in a different way, nevertheless. “Reports of the death of the jukebox form by theater critics are typically more of a wish than an empirical remark,” writes Charles McNulty in his (stinging) review. “But this latest incarnation deserves to topple the complete category.” There are too many biting lines on this review and I can’t put all of them here.
And since one “Romeo and Juliet“-themed jukebox musical just isn’t enough: The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber writes about Max Martin, the songwriter behind the tunes within the jukebox musical “& Juliet,” which is currently on Broadway. To not be confused with “The Last Goodbye,” a jukebox musical inspired by “Romeo and Juliet” that features tunes by Jeff Buckley.
ICYMI, McNulty had an important convo with playwright Lynn Nottage last week, whose comedy “Clyde’s” is currently on the stage on the Mark Taper. Amongst other things, she talks about all of the work by Black playwrights that has are available in her wake: “The one thing I believe we still must move toward is to stop making plays that feel like they’re designed for the white gaze.”
Classical notes
L.A. Phil musical director Gustavo Dudamel returned to his native Venezuela for the primary time in six years and his hometown of Barquisimeto for the primary time in 11 years to guide rehearsals for the country’s famed youth music program, El Sistema. Times classical music critic Mark Swed spoke to him in regards to the experience of returning. It was necessary, he says, to return, in order that “the youngsters needed to see that I’m there for them, that I’m not only an idea.”
Most wonderful time of the 12 months
That is the tip, beautiful friend — of 2022. Which implies it’s time to bring on the listicles!!! Art critic Christopher Knight rounds up the 12 months’s biggest art stories and museum blunders, while theater critic Charles McNulty reviewed this most difficult comeback 12 months for live performance. Classical music critic Mark Swed has the classical 12 months in review (it’s all about resilience), culture author Deborah Vankin rounds up the works which have been most meaningful to her, and a panel of 4 book critics weigh in on the 12 months’s reads.
Find the complete package at this link, with additional lists for film, TV and music (with playlists!).
I couldn’t pull it together to do a year-end list because I’m me. But fellow architecture writers Mark Lamster (Dallas Morning News) and Alexandra Lange (creator of the mall history “Meet Me by the Fountain”) invited me to pitch in on their highly unofficial architecture and design awards for 2022. It features commendations reminiscent of the Golden Carbuncle Trophy and a Rivers of Babylon Plaque — in other words, it’s greater than the Pritzker.
Annals of the Latin American bizarre
I wrote an appreciation of HBO’s “Los Espookys” after its cancellation last week, an unclassifiable show that I even have categorized as “‘Scooby-Doo’ as written by Jorge Luis Borges and directed by Pedro Almodóvar.”
Latest York Times dance critic Gia Kourlas writes in regards to the virality of the Wednesday dance — inspired by Jenna Ortega‘s freaky jig within the “Addams Family” spinoff “Wednesday” on Netflix.
Moves
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County has released updated renderings for its ongoing expansion and renovation, featuring a latest entrance and a latest indoor-outdoor wing by L.A. firm Frederick Fisher & Partners.
Penske Media has acquired Artforum magazine, adding it to an existing stable of art publications that features Art in America and ARTnews.
Sculptor Veronica Ryan, known for works that employ humble materials and that nod to her Caribbean roots, has been named the recipient of this 12 months’s Turner Prize.
Kojin Karatani, a philosopher known for his critiques of capitalism and a very important literary critic in his native Japan, is the recipient of the $1-million Berggruen Prize.
Passages
Aline Kominsky-Crumb, an artist who injected a dark humor and an empowered, raunchy female sexuality to comics, has died at 74.
In other news
— Latest York’s Metropolitan Opera is contending with a cyberattack that has kept its computer systems down for greater than three days.
— The School of the Art Institute of Chicago has rescinded the honorary degree it awarded musician Kanye West (now referred to as Ye) in 2015.
— ICYMI, The Times’ August Brown went deep on how Ye went from respected artist and designer to losing endorsements and other partnerships over his racist and antisemitic rants and his association with neofascist Nick Fuentes.
— In Munich, an exhibition explores the richness of queer life in Germany within the early twentieth century — and the ways through which the Nazis attempted to stamp it out.
— Rosanna McLaughlin has a great essay in ArtReview about “Death of an Artist,” the recent podcast about Ana Mendieta‘s life and death.
— Curbed’s Alissa Walker looks back at Mayor Eric Garcetti‘s term using the health of the town’s sidewalks as a measure. The temperature? It’s not good.
— All the eye is on San Francisco’s $1.7-million toilet, but take a look at these space-age public restrooms from JCDecaux that the town is installing near the Embarcadero. Take me to my ship!
— I dug this Latest Yorker story in regards to the history of the multiverse — an intriguing narrative device that also allows film studios to endlessly recycle characters and plot devices.
And last but not least …
The best way to get a COVID-19 booster in California. Seriously, folks, it’s gnaaaaarly on the market.