Artillery Magazine

“Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city.”Dorothy Parker I like to go to parties. If you invite me, I’ll come. I never plan to stay long (“I’m just going to make an appearance,” I tell myself), but once I arrive, I end up having a great time and linger until some regrettable hour of the morning. I’ll dance if there’s dancing, sing if there’s singing, eat and drink whatever’s handed to me, and give 200% to a conversation with people I’ll never see again. I don’t discriminate; I’m equally happy to hear a stranger’s darkest secret or have the same boring conversation I’ve had a hundred times before. Which is why I can tell you with confidence: at every kind of Los Angeles party I’ve ever attended—dinner,…

I missed the party. A party that promised nothing less than to reveal the nature of reality. I wanted to go, but the promised revelation of full reality was curtailed by immediate financial reality—I had to go to a wedding out of town the night before and couldn’t afford the only flight that would get me back in time for the event. I grudgingly accepted that I might be on too tight a budget to leave Plato’s Cave. And what did I miss? Reality was better than I could have guessed: A helicopter dropped a wooden crate from the sky and inside was a giant cake. Champagne—bottles floated on a sea of sculpted ice in a fountain—never stopped flowing, dispensed by waiters wearing crisp white frocks. An orchestra of cellists…

LA-based photographer Gerd Ludwig has been recording the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster for the last two decades. Here, Artillery presents a selection of Ludwig’s most recent images, focusing on the ghost town of Pripyat. The near-classically surreal tableaus shown in Ludwig’s new work are the result not merely of the meltdown itself, but also of the following decades of disaster tourism, legal and otherwise. Furniture, gas masks, dolls, toys, books, clothes, papers, and the thousand appurtenances of everyday life have been disrupted and rearranged by first the catastrophe and then the scavengers, taggers, gawkers, and vloggers that came to witness what it had wrought. Ludwig’s photographs become behind-the-scenes photographs revealing the arrangements of other, now-vanished photographers just as those previous photographers were themselves attempting to summon the ghost…

The Institutionalization of the Obvious CASEY ASH “Art critics gladly assume the role of intellectual janitor, and gladly become more patient and accommodating, explaining in smooth, step-by-step essays each institutionalization of the obvious, with the appropriate catechismal tone…” —Peter Plagens, “Roughly Ordered Thoughts on the Occasion of the Bruce Nauman Retrospective in Los Angeles”, Artforum, 1973 “Even in Tibet the yab-yum images are not intended for general use but are meant to be viewed only by those who have received proper instruction concerning their esoteric significance.” —Encyclopedia Britannica, 2025 I do my best to explain Bruce Nauman to the friend I went to LACMA with and then we make our way to the other side of the museum, where, several rooms deep into “Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across…

Why do you collect art? Because I can’t not. Art keeps me awake, thinking, and alive. It’s a rush for me. The emotions it evokes for me are some of the most visceral feelings I have experienced. When a piece stirs something in me, curiosity, joy, or even discomfort, it has to come home with me. Collecting is less about ownership and more about living alongside energy that keeps me awake and thinking. What current art trend are you obsessed with? The return of maximalism. I love that artists are leaning into boldness again—texture, scale, even chaos. Minimalism has had a good run, but life’s too short for bare walls. Where are some fun and offbeat places you find your artists? Instagram at 2 a.m. has led me to some…

THE SHOW: LIORAH TCHIPROUT The world-building possibilities of dolls, the projections they dutifully absorb, the romantic and clandestine lives we hope they’re living when we tuck Barbie and Ken in the sock drawer together, seem to be at the core of Tchiprout’s paintings. The subjects of these works, according to the press release, are painted from the artist’s own handmade dolls, which she stages in her London studio. Looking at them, I was reminded of a book my parents gave me as a child called Secrets from the Dollhouse, about a defiant young doll named Emma who dreams of going on adventures under the infinite night sky, only to find that she’s happiest at home with her little wooden family. As a young girl, I saw myself in Emma, her…