Posts By brandon joyce

Los Angeles: A Community of the Living and the Dead.

Los Angeles. You have to wonder when the United States is going to kick its cultural amnesia and get on with some real, workable, world-historical consciousness; when it’ll finally enter History rather than just history. My guess is in a century or two, when we’ve joined the underdogs and the past seems prettier and not so conveniently forgotten. But History is not so much forgotten here as it is repressed and replaced; forced so far down that it pops up with the weirdest, WTF symptomology.

The sublime ministry of the Museum of Jurassic Technology

It’s unlikely, if you’ve never been to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, that I’d be able to adequately catch you up to speed in a single post. Hell, even if you had been there— and felt, like I did, that you’d found your new favorite thing in the universe— it still might get a little confusing.

Las Vegas Studio: Images from Venturi and Brown

Las Vegas Studio: Images from Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown at the The MOCA Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles. Learning from Las Vegas was a real watershed moment— or maybe I should say a real Waterloo moment— in architectural history. This book was the first, fully-formulated backlash against the dictates of Modernist architecture, however polite in its tone. Running contrary to every last tenet of the International Style, the polemic warmly extolled the symbol and ornament, fun and dysfunction, the ugly and ordinary, the redundant and duck-shaped— and nearly everything else that had been shaved from the severe, honest, ... More » »

Breaking News at Little Berlin.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a real sucker for hijacking idioms. That is, moving into a certain idiom— like Airport Retail, Las Vegas, Ancient Persia, Higher Education— and adopting its forms and format for parody, analysis, or even as a straightforward medium. It was this weakness that first grabbed me when I found the flyer for the Breaking News show, now up at Little Berlin… So ripe, I thought, that whole idiom. Weather. Sports. Anchordesks. The inflections of Newsspeak. Tickertape… The whole business.

Erica Prince, et al., Far In Far Out, FUEL Collection.

I’ve always wondered how those little fascinations of childhood— toys— one day make their way into fully-formed, grown-up culture-making. Action Figures. Blocks. Clay. Dollhouses. No one can convince me that those hands-on pieces of plastic were not, for me and every other child, objects of True Beauty. Just try to remember: standing in the aisles of the toystore, clutching the box of some Star Wars spacecraft, admiring its every last curve and sticker, in the thrall of your first true aesthetic experiences. Or, playing on the living room carpet, building up microfortresses out of God knows what, manipulating forms and ... More » »

Philadelphia and its Manufactures— Jacob Hellman, Phillip Taylor

August 20th, Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction.– Pretty tickled by this presentation. Jacob [i.e. speaker Jacob Hellman] and I have, on numerous occasions, swapped ideas on the arcane beauty of both former Philadelphian industry and its currently-aching hell-neighborhoods. But rather than getting lost in the mythos and delirium, as I always have, Jacob remained admirably embedded in the history of it all; drawing from research, anecdotes, and his definitive resource, Philadelphia and its Manufactures, by Edwin T. Freedley.

Obsessive collectors convention this month at Copy

Post by Brandon Joyce Installation shot from Collections Show at Copy. Image features Neon Pink Things collected by Callie Konane Rickards (center), Andrew Jeffrey Wright‘s Family Circus books collection (left) and Erica Prince’s Best Friends photos collection (right) This month, at Copy Gallery, Luren Jenison curated a Collections Show, with entries gathered from the private caches of various New York and Philadelphia obsessives. Slews of ski masks, records, stationery, squeaky toys, succulents, weirdo children’s videos, Family Circus Books— pinned up and spread out like cases of dried butterflies. Leslie Rogers’ paper bag collection Three or four entries, in particular, really ... More » »