The Plastic Bag Store has arrived in LA. If you are like me and cringe when you arrive at the grocery store having forgotten your canvas bags or stare in dismay at the farmers market when those luscious ripe strawberries need protection then this sly pop up installation is for you. Robin Frohardt’s on-the-road store is more fun than her puppet film which is a bit too didactic but nevertheless makes its point: the future is grim if we don’t figure out how to get the stuff home without sheathing it in something indestructible that will haunt our children and theirs. Everything is made out of recycled plastic or paper. The copy is very clever.
Man Ray's wife Juliet's desk in Paris
This is the desk of Juliet Man Ray, the former dancer, model and Hollywood hopeful Juliet Browner who married Man (they had met in an LA nightclub) in 1946 in a double wedding with Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. He was a Jewish boy from South Philly (ne Emanuel Radnitzky), she a Jewish girl from Brooklyn (she is pictured with the violin in the wood frame). On the desk you can see a gold cast of Man Ray's famous lips, a mini one of his irons, and other bibelots of his. I visited with Julie in Paris at their studio where she still lived on the Rue Ferou when I interviewed her for a PBS film about Picasso, she was every bit as theatrical as I had imagined and still carrying a torch for her husband who had died in 1976. They are buried together at the Montparnasse cemetery. Recently, the Gagosian exhibition of his work in San Francisco brought this all back to me.
Luchita Hurtado, now 98, at the Serpentine
I first saw Luchita Hurtado’s work in LA a few years ago when a tiny alternative gallery owner was desperately trying to keep control of her archive. Hauser and Wirth swooped in and now there is an exquisite show at the Serpentine Sackler (what will they do about this appellation?) in London, in an early Zaha Hadid building. The exhibition cements recognition for Hurtado’s expressive and unique vision. Her husband Lee Mullican was the more recognized figure as was often the case with married artists of the time. All that has changed. This work painted just recently: she’s 98.