In this catalogue MOCA curator Connie Butler expands the concept of “drawing” and explores the reinvention of narrative through serial and notational approaches both on paper and outside the traditional parameters associated with drawing, including film, video, and installation. Essay by Cornelia H. Butler.

Power of Suggestion

Butler, Cornelia H.

Smart Art Press

Fred Tomaselli

Greene, David A.

Tager, Alisa

Lisa Yuskavage's work is about desire: a disturbing melange of portraits of babylike women residing in a world of lush, saturated colors that bely a dark psychological space just this side of the fetishistic. On lurid grounds of greens, pinks, purples, and aquas her figures often emerge apparitionally-flesh, clothing, and hair delineated through shadows and light in a disconcerting blurring of boundaries. With striking intensity, these childlike women both attract and repel with their frank and seductive psychosexual power. Essay by Faye Hirsh; interview by Chuck Close.

Lisa Yuskavage

Faye Hirsch

Arts & Photography

Don Ed Hardy’s weirdly beautiful pictorial narratives are drawn from a rich heritage of graphic traditions. Illustrated in this catalogue are a stunning array of paintings, drawings, and watercolors that mine sources as diverse as classical Japanese tattooing, eccentric Chinese and Tibetan pictorial traditions, and the paintings of Renaissance Siena. Tapping into and twisting the iconography and themes distilled from his twenty-year career as one of the founding fathers of modern tattooing, Hardy’s paintings revel in the enigmatic allegories that surround the essential life experiences so often commemorated in tattoos--sex, love, death. Above all, it is his love of drawing--everywhere evident in this topsy-turvy mixing of old and new in subject and technique--from traditional religious iconography and modern cartoon characters to Japanese ukiyo-e painting and classic tattoo motifs from World War I--that gives Hardy’s paintings their raw power, sense of humor, and alluring beauty. Essay by David Levi Strauss. First edition (2,000 copies), 22 pages, softcover, color illustrations, 9x6 inches.

Don Ed Hardy: Permanent Curios

Hardy, Don Ed

This exhibition catalogue presents ten African artists who are no longer bound by old affiliations of geography and race but whose work inevitably embodies a common claim to their home continent. Curated by Olu Oguibe, Cross/ing includes sculpture, painting, drawing, video, electronic art, installation, and photography that is likely to challenge the Western viewer’s expectations of African art. Essays by Okwui Enwezor and Olu Oguibe.

Cross/ing: Time.Space.Movement

Olu Oguibe

Photography & Video

A roller-skating nun prophesizes the death of rock'n'roll in spray paint on the walls of a Mexico City high-rise. The angular, succulent leaves of the maguey plant dance to the rhythm of Shostakovich's 11th Symphony. A feminist prankster wreaks havoc in a monastic order by adding LSD to the friars' drinking supply. A postmodern ranchera singer savors the taste of her own pumping heart. Mexican cinema is ripe with such subversive images: over the last sixty years scores of film- and video-makers have fractured narrative and toppled conventions in an avant-garde rebellion that has taken a myriad of subversive forms, and they are all sampled in this first-ever survey of experimental Mexican media arts. Edited by Rita Gonzáles and Jesse Lerner.

Mexperimental Cinema: 60 Years of Avant-garde Media Arts from Mexico

Rita Gonzalez

Desmothernismo surveys the work that Rubn Ortiz Torres has produced over the last seven years as he's commuted back and forth across the U.S./Mexican border, using diverse media to explore the linguistic, aesthetic, and social collisions of art and culture. This exhibition catalogue includes the full range of his wildly eclectic work, including paintings/pictograms combining modern art symbols with ethnic stereotypes; photographs of scenes from both sides of the border that mix allegory with documentation; customized baseball caps that make a twisted fashion statement about the relationship between aesthetics, history, mass media, politics, sports, and community; and his acclaimed recent installation Alien Toyz.

Ruben Ortiz Torres: Desmothernismo

Tyler Stallings

David A. Greene

Ruben Ortiz Torres

Poems are layered in paintings-obscured, written over, then painted again. Found objects are treated lovingly and elevated above their humble throwaway status. Old and new rub against each other in textured works that suggest a fractured narrative composed of the artist's visual and emotional memories. This volume is an extraordinary look into the process and mind of an artist whose boundless creative output touches a myriad of media and modes of expression. Included in the book are writings, paintings, collages, assemblages, found objects, and photographs that point to the fluidity of meaning of a world in flux, as well as a special spoken-word and music CD by Mortensen. Mortensen is best known for his outstanding performances in films such as A Perfect Murder, GI Jane, and Portrait of A Lady, and Gus Van Sant's Psycho. He is also the author of several books of poetry and other writings.

Recent Forgeries (Book & CD-ROM)

Viggo Mortensen

Individual Artists

Forming: The Early Days of L.A. Punk brings to life the unprecedented musical and artistic dynamo that was the Los Angeles punk scene from 1978 to 1982. Fueled by ambivalence to the prevailing cultural climate, musicians, artists, writers, photographers, and a diverse audience joined together to produce a flourishing punk community. This book includes numerous images by photographers on the scene as well as reproductions of flyers, magazines, 45s, albums, posters, and other ephemera. Documenting the edgy angst of the local performance art scene are photographs of Johanna Went, the Kipper Kids, and a legendary 1978 performance by Viennese Actionist Herman Nitsch. Also included are texts by Slash magazine editor Claude Bessy; a conversation with Exene Cervenka and John Doe of the band X; and a timeline that juxtaposes the highlights of punk with the low points of popular culture and news-of-the-day. Designed by Steve Samiof, the original publisher and designer of Slash magazine.

Forming: The Early Days of L.A. Punk

Bessy, Claude

Used. Very Good conditions. May have soft reading marks and name of the previous owner.

Kazu

Herb Ritts

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