CORE in 2008: Math Goes Out the Window

My favorite class in undergrad was a Graphic Design class. It was taught by a succession of professors who wore black and were obsessed with the Swiss International Style, which they would use to brutally repress all attempts at vernacular in a short lecture each day at the beginning of class. For the rest of the class they would alternately jump, glide, shout and whisper in front of the class usually in some boring outfit of all black, 'cause that's what graphic designers do. They were deeply in love with the Swiss International Style. They knew it inside and out, and because of their apathetic melancholy, their stultifying approach to teaching and sheer sarcastic entertainment value, they kicked me out of the class three separate semesters. I wish I could say that the CORE 2008 was as brutally patronizing as graphic communications, and a little less like Al Souza, the dude who ran a painting class and actually enjoyed it.

Most of the artists in this year’s show find themselves situated communicating with us and instead of behind a pulpit, they don't really seem to be teaching us. Teaching is bad for people. Unfortunately, when I left the show, I didn't feel a lot like I had just spent three hours of a beautiful Arizona Sunday morning in the Flagstaff Tabernacle listening to Floyd Patterson.

That paragraph was like huffing freon.

I kinda thought the show was entertaining, lively, and where it veered towards Vicodin downer formalism- the math was gone. Best of the mess was surely Mequitta Ahuja, who's uber-trippy women needed a little more room to breathe.

Two paintings on paper were obviously newer than a more wooden painting on canvas that was suffering the fate of the sun in the front room. The bulbous forms emerging from the mass of hair in Inseminated dripped down from a head in the top right corner of the paper. The two-panel Afro-Galaxy went the other way, exploring a sci-fi poster imaginary cosmos, with a fashionably 2007 bohemian hipster attached to the bottom left.


Afro-Galaxy


Inseminated





Andres Janacua

Most of Andres Janacua's stuff is really oblique, but he's not a conceptual fuckwad. At least he does social interventions and fucks around and goes and sets up a gallery in a small town in Mexico when he doesn't have to present things in a glorified hallway. His video was rather horrible, though. Taking out vowels, huh. I didn't know that, but I didn't spend too much time on it.

Janacua isn't really fucking with you all that much. Michael Bise said that it said social seduction, but I don't remember that. As opposed to Sergio Torres-Torres' tone in his sarcastic paintings, I'd prefer the pathetic tinfoil whimper-style note of resistance. Speaking of, the whole hip meaning embedded in T-T's paintings is kind of a run-around since he glorifies the revolutionary (and negative) aspects of the LA early-90s riots right next to the sarcastic 'revolution blows' paintings.


Sergio Torres-Torres is not easy to confuse with...

Raymond Pettibon, who draws differently.

Kara Hearn has suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. She used to do youtube videos where she aped scenes from old movies. They were funny until Jack Black did it on the big screen in Be Kind Rewind. It's a bitch. Now she's making people cry.



The little cove Hearn made was a grey corner with bumpy taped edges and matching wooden chairs. I turned up the volume to watch Cara McCormick try to cry. After a lot of trying she laughed "I can't cry!" and the high volume sent guards scuttling from the rafters to check it out.

I'm glad I wasn't sitting there any more when they got there.