Keith Edmier 1991-2007

Ranging from Edmier’s earliest works, such as I Met a Girl Who Sang the Blues (1991) through Bremen Towne, a new large-scale commission built for the exhibition at Bard, Keith Edmier: 1991-2007 presents a remarkable overview of Edmier’s work. It demonstrates not only the power of the artist’s use of his autobiographical landscape as a foil for considering a collective experience, but also his technical expertise as a sculptor. Many of Edmier’s works build upon and expose the intersections between his personal world and such American cultural touchstones as motorcycle stuntman Evel Knievel and 70s icon Farrah Fawcett, with whom he collaborated, as well as Janis Joplin and John Lennon. “Through the act of sculpture he voraciously pursues his memories,” writes curator Tom Eccles, citing both Jill Peters (1997), a “virginal portrait of his childhood sweetheart standing awkwardly in her sweater, skirt, and bobby socks” constructed in wax from a yearbook picture, and Beverly Edmier, 1967 (1998), a portrait of the artist’s mother, in which the yet-to-be-born artist is revealed through the stomach of his seated mother.

“Keith Edmier 1991-2007” remains at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N. Y., (845) 758-7598, through Feb. 3.

Read the New York Times review here.

Aesthetic Heft, Sized for a Snow Globe

"PPOW is pleased to announce Islands, its seventh exhibition featuring the collaborative work of Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz. In their recent work Martin & Muñoz have created a series of panoramas and snow globes that image forbidding island landscapes buried in ice and snow. This is a world imagined, and in a physical sense one where perhaps continents have slowly been swallowed to a point where only the tops of mountains and high places survive as dry land. Vast oceanic emptiness separates lines of evolution and communication, science reverts to philosophy and history to myth. Dissolution continues until there are parts of the world that no longer have knowledge of each other.

These archipelagos and islands can be seen to function both in a physical and metaphysical way. Whether this is a place or a state of mind what is clear is that winter has come and may never go away. The island literature of fiction, satire and myth imagined over centuries could be read as prophetic. H.G. Wells’ Isle of Dr. Moreau, Homer’s Isle of Circe or Swift’s Lilliput is all possible in a world made up of fractured and disparate islands, at least in the minds of its inhabitants.

This is a developing project. Martin & Muñoz are imagining the contours of a different world in the same way a blind man feels an elephant. There are implications of a narrative but one that is shuffled, fragmented, and dreamlike. There are fantastic components where the laws of physics, anatomy and predictable behavior seem to have been broken or forgotten.

Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz have been collaborating since 1994 and have since exhibited internationally. Their work is in many museum collections, including Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, La Caixa in Barcelona, Spain and the KIASMA Museum of Contemporary art in Helsinki, Finland. Concurrent with the exhibition at PPOW the artists have solo exhibitions at Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art in Vienna, Austria and at Cerealart in Philadelphia, PA."

Read the New York Times review here.

Video Art Thinks Big: That’s Showbiz

"WE’RE in a house of many tight, messy rooms. In the suburbs? Cyberspace? Hard to say. Anyway, it’s night. A door bangs open. A girl, who is also a boy, dashes in, talking, talking. Other people are already there, in gaudy attire, dire wigs and makeup like paint on de Koonings.

Everyone moves in a jerky, speeded-up, look-at-me way and speaks superfast to one another, to the camera, into a cellphone. Phrases whiz by about cloning, family, same-sex adoption, the art world, the end of the world, identity, blogging, the future. Suddenly indoors turns into outdoors, night into day, and we’re at a picnic, in dappled sunshine, with a baby. Then this all reverses, and we’re indoors again. A goth band is pounding away in the kitchen. The house is under siege. Hysteria. Everyone runs through the walls.

This is a highly impressionistic account of Ryan Trecartin’s sensationally anarchic video “I-Be Area,” which made its debut in the Elizabeth Dee Gallery in Manhattan last fall. The piece caused a stir, in part because most people had never seen anything quite like it before, certainly not in an art gallery.

Art video still has a funny reputation, left over from the 1960s, of being a serious medium, made for function rather than pleasure, as opposed to film. Yet “I-Be Area” was pleasure all the way. It was nonstop visual razzle-dazzle. It drew on every cheap-thrill trick in the digital graphics playbook.

More radically, it was the length of a feature film. More radically still, it told a story, one with dozens of characters and multiple subplots, which is what entertainment, not art, is supposed to do, if you assume there’s a hard and fast difference between the two.

Mr. Trecartin, apparently, does not assume this. He is not alone. The American artist and performer Kalup Linzy, for example, has invented a serial soap opera around a dysfunctional African-American family. Sadie Benning uses hand-drawn animation to tell bittersweet tales of urban gay life. Nathalie Djurberg, born in Sweden and living in Berlin, sculptures clay figures and sets them in sadistic encounters. These artists, using video that is cheaper and more accessible than ever thanks to digital technology, are creating a new kind of 21st-century art that is narrative in form and potentially epic in scale.

At present it is shaped by a combination of pop fantasy, ingrained cybersmarts, neo-tribalism and an angst-free take on contemporary life that marks an attention-deficient Internet culture.
The relationship of this work to an art world structured on galleries, museums and fairs is, potentially at least, one of detachment. You can experience “I-Be Area” on a laptop wherever and whenever you want. That may be a reason why few of these new video artists feel the need to live in New York City. They have chosen a medium that is not only flexible and affordable but has a history of embracing experimentation.

Video 40 years ago offered restless, penurious, disenfranchised and performance-based artists (many women worked in early video) an alternative to the blue-chip clubbiness of Pop painting and Minimalist sculpture. Video was associated with television and newsreels, not art. It was available and fairly easy to learn. Because it had no aesthetic history, it came with no fixed expectations. Using it allowed artists like Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Nam Jun Paik to open a fresh chapter in art history."

Read more here.

Anselm Kiefer: Sculpture and Paintings

At the Masaachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art thru 2008

"German artist Anselm Kiefer conjoins matter, history and time in a moving installation of paintings and monumental sculpture opening October 20th at MASS MoCA. MASS MoCA’s centerpiece Building 4 galleries will feature four vast landscape paintings from a recent series never before seen in the United States, two paintings from the 1980’s, and an immense concrete sculpture, Etroits sont les Vaisseaux."

“Among our most important poets of war, in this surprising body of works Anselm Kiefer presents us with poignant moments of color flowering across the ruined topographies of his vast canvases,” said Joseph Thompson, Director of MASS MoCA. “For reasons I still cannot fully fathom, the Connecticut courts have recently required Andy and Christine Hall to remove Kiefer’s elegiac Etroits sont les Vaisseaux from their property. I’ve long admired that particular sculpture – its siting was exquisite – and I was delighted when the Halls offered it on long-term loan to MASS MoCA. That spirited act of generosity was further amplified as we discussed creating a specific installation of Kiefer works keyed to Etroits sont les Vaisseaux. Admirers of Kiefer will find this exhibition revelatory – the relative profusion of color is unexpected, and somehow especially touching because of that fact – and for those who may have missed the wonderful Fort Worth and Bilbao surveys of Kiefer’s work, this focused installation presents a powerful environment in which to become familiar with his recent work. Two earlier canvases with overlapping themes will place this timely new body of work in a broader context.”

The New York Times has a review.

Getty and video

From the New York Times

"EARLY this year the artist Martin von Haselberg, better known as one-half of the Kipper Kids performance duo, made a pilgrimage to the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles to view a video he hadn’t seen since he created it in 1976. The institute had just rediscovered it in the Long Beach Museum of Art video archives, a trove of early work that the institute acquired in December 2005.

In many ways the tape is typical of the years when video was an exciting new art form, ripe for cheap experimentation, as well as a novel way to document another relatively new medium, performance art. The tape’s first half shows Mr. von Haselberg playing around with technology as he mugs behind a magnifying lens that grotesquely enlarges and distorts his features.
In the second half Mr. von Haselberg and the other Kipper Kid, Brian Routh, send up macho camaraderie by grunting and singing in cockney-accented gibberish while roughing each other up, urinating in tandem and stripping to the buff.

It also seems typical that until last summer Mr. von Haselberg (who later became a commodities broker and married Bette Midler) had forgotten the tape’s existence. Back then, as he noted, most artists weren’t too careful about keeping track of their video output."

"In March a fraction of the institute’s vast video holdings will go on view in three major shows: “Making It Together,” about early feminist art collaborations, opening on March 2 at the Bronx Museum of Art; the retrospective “Allan Kaprow: Art as Life,” opening on March 23 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; and the Getty’s own “California Video,” a joint project of the research institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum, opening on March 15, that will offer video made in California between 1968 and 2008."

Lawrence Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can See

At the Whitney thru February 10th

"Lawrence Weiner's mind-stretching 40-year retrospective...is respite, wake-up call and purification rite all in one...Driven by the joy of language and quite a bit of humor, Mr. Weiner's ebullient work asks tough questions about who makes or owns art, where it can occur and how long it lasts. It reminds us that while art and money may have been inextricably entwined throughout most of history, art's real value is not measured in strings of zeros, high-priced materials or bravura skill, but in communication, experience, economy of means (the true beauty) and, yes, the inspired disturbance of all status quos." - The New York Times

New Galleries for Oceanic Art

"The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Oceanic galleries closed three years ago for redesign and refurbishment and for conservation work on the art itself. Now the spectacular, beautifully reinstalled rooms have opened. Occupying 17,000 square feet in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, most in a great hallway open to natural light through a slanting glass wall, the New Galleries for Oceanic Art present more than 400 works of art and craft from a vast, watery realm of more than 25,000 islands, including those of Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia and Southeast Asia, as well as from Australia. It is a wonderfully expansive, soul-stirring display. "

The New York Times has a review.

Gone

From the New York Times:

"Over the course of three decades, until his death at 78 in 1986, Emery Blagdon built what he thought of as a great healing machine in an unheated shed on his farm in the Nebraska Sandhills, near North Platte.

Using baling wire, string, masking tape, wood, glass, sheet metal, aluminum foil, wax paper and many other materials, he constructed snarly, extraordinarily complicated structures. They resemble mobiles, chandeliers, television antennas and electrical generators. He arranged them, along with his vibrantly colored abstract paintings, in an indoor environment that he believed would generate curative electromagnetic energy."