current

On Mock-Ups

2008-04-11T12:40:00.000-07:00

At the Storefront for Art and Architecture.

On Mock-ups, Home Videos and Housekeeping: a video exhibition in 3 parts Mar 25 2008 - May 3 2008

1- Mock-Ups in Close-Up

March 25 2008 - April 5 2008

Architectural Models in Cinema 1927 – 2007 A video project by Gabu Heindl and Drehli Robnik, 2008 (105', running on loop).

2 - Come to Israel: It's hot and wet and we have the Humus

April 8 2008 - April 19 2008

Role Playing in Military Practices, Sexual Practices and Videotaping Video works by Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir and Yossi Atia & Itamar Rose Curated by Joshua Simon.

3 - Koolhaas Houselife

April 22 2008 - May 3 2008

Stories from the daily life of Guadalupe Acedo, caretaker and housekeeper of the House in Bordeaux designed by Rem Koolhaas A film by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine (70', running on loop).

Takashi Murakami

2008-04-11T12:28:00.000-07:00

From the Brooklyn Museum's website:

"The most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of internationally acclaimed Japanese artist Takashi Murakami includes more than ninety works in various media that span the artist’s entire career, installed in more than 18,500 square feet of gallery space.

Born in Tokyo in 1962, Murakami is one of the most influential and acclaimed artists to have emerged from Asia in the late twentieth century, creating a wide-ranging body of work that consciously bridges fine art, design, animation, fashion, and popular culture. He received a Ph.D. from the prestigious Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he was trained in the school of traditional Japanese painting known as Nihonga, a nineteenth-century mixture of Western and Eastern styles. However, the prevailing popularity of anime (animation) and manga (comic books) directed his interest toward the art of animation because, as he has said, “it was more representative of modern day Japanese life.” American popular culture in the form of animation, comics, and fashion are among the influences on his work, which includes painting, sculpture, installation, and animation, as well as a wide range of collectibles, multiples, and commercial products.

The exhibition © MURAKAMI explores the self-reflexive nature of Murakami’s oeuvre by focusing on earlier work produced between 1992 and 2000 in which the artist attempts to explore his own reality through an investigation of branding and identity, as well as through self-portraiture created since 2000. Two works examining these subjects were a part of a group show, My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation, presented at the Brooklyn Museum in 2001.

Among the works included in this large-scale survey tracing the trajectory of Murakami’s artistic development are many of his acclaimed sculpture figures including the 23-foot-high Tongari-kun (2003–4); Miss Ko2 (1997), a long-legged waitress who has become one of the artist’s signature characters; and Hiropon (1997), a Japanese girl jumping a rope created by milk spurting from her gargantuan breasts. Among the paintings on view will be Tan Tan Bo (2001), as well as Tan Tan Bo Puking—a.k.a. Gero Tan (2002). "

The New York Times has a lengthy review here.

Making it Together

2008-04-11T12:24:00.000-07:00

From Karen Rosenberg

“More, please” has been the critical response to “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” the survey of pioneering feminist art currently installed at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center. The Bronx Museum of the Arts anticipated the demand with “Making It Together: Women’s Collaborative Art and Community,” which focuses on the groups and collectives that linked feminist art to a larger social context.

Organized by the critic Carey Lovelace, “Making It Together” occupies part of the lobby and a small adjacent gallery. Conventional art objects are few and far between: pink-painted walls display archival photographs, manifestoes and other ephemera. The show is much smaller than “WACK!” but includes a wealth of historical material, much of which would be better served by a book or documentary film.

The theme is timely, at least; the current Whitney Biennial is rife with collaborative projects. For female artists of the ’70s and ’80s, collective practice had several advantages. In keeping with the anti-authoritarian spirit of the times, it played down the roles of the individual artist and the marketable artwork. It also turned the stereotype of women as inherently conciliatory and cooperative into a source of strength."

More here.

Sigalit Landau

2008-04-11T12:04:00.000-07:00

From the MoMA's website

"Sigalit Landau (b. Israel, 1969) has produced several works that explore her native Israeli landscape in a performative way, primarily through a video trilogy that experiments with circular movements and the act of spinning. In DeadSee (2005), Landau floats in a spiral of green watermelons until the coil slowly unravels. The intensely red flesh of the fruits is revealed as they disappear, leaving the azure surface of the water nearly monochromatic. In addition, a constellation of sculptural lamp-like objects made of barbed wire have been submerged in the salt-saturated Dead Sea and dried in the desert sun, forming a crystallized surface. The exhibition is lit by the self-illuminated moving images and salt-crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling." Thru 7/28.

View the Online Exhibition here.

Review here.

Reviews

2008-04-11T08:23:00.000-07:00

Hyungkoo Lee at Arario Gallery thru 4/19. Review

Angelo Filomeno at Galerie Lelong thru 4/12. Review

Dike Blair/Noah Sheldon at D'Amelio Terras thru 5/3. Review

Martha Wilson at Mitchell Algus Gallery thru 4/26. Review

Katy Moran at Andrea Rosen Gallery thru 4/19. Review

Ai Weiwei at Mary Boone thru 4/26. Review

"From One O to the Other" at Orchard thru 4/20. Review

Adrian Piper at Elizabeth Dee thru 4/19. Review

Three Reviews

2008-04-11T08:10:00.001-07:00

Among these six reviews, you'll find opinions on:

Marcel Dzama at David Zwirner thru 4/19

Anna Craycroft at Tracy Williams Ltd. thru 4/25

Franz West at Gagosian thru 4/26

When Cool Turns Cold

2008-04-11T08:02:00.000-07:00

The Whitney Biennial, chockablock with bloodless M.F.A. product, is a little too smart for its own good.

By Jerry Saltz

"At the Whitney, 2008 is the year of the Art School Biennial. Not because the art in the new Biennial is immature or because the artists all went to art school—although I bet they did—but because it centers on a very narrow slice of highly educated artistic activity and features a lot of very thought-out, extremely self-conscious, carefully pieced-together installations, sculpture, and earnestly political art. These works often resemble architectural fragments, customized found objects, ersatz modernist monuments, Home Depot displays, graphic design, or magazine layouts, and the resultant assemblage-college aesthetic, while compelling in the hands of some, is completely beholden to ideas taught in hip academies. It’s the style du jour right now. (It also promises to become really annoying in the not too distant future, but that’s another column.)

Perhaps the show is so inclined toward the current art-school moment because its curators, Henriette Huldisch, 36, and Shamim M. Momin, 34, were in part selected for their youth. I was thrilled that the Whitney was prepared to give itself over to young curators. No sooner had they been named, however, than Whitney director Adam Weinberg pulled back the reins, announcing that the two would be “overseen” by the museum’s chief curator, Donna De Salvo, and that they’d “worked with” the advisers Thelma Golden, Bill Horrigan, and Linda Norden. If you’re going to entrust young curators with your signature show, you ought to give them enough rope to do it. (Plus enough time: Huldisch and Momin had all of thirteen months to pull this show together.)"

Read more here.

The Topic Is Race; the Art Is Fearless.

2008-04-11T07:57:00.000-07:00

From Holland Carter for the New York Times

"Campaigning politicians talk solutions; artists talk problems. Politics deals in goals and initiatives; art, or at least interesting art, in a language of doubt and nuance. This has always been true when the subject is race. And when it is, art is often ahead of the political news curve, and heading in a contrary direction."

Much more here.

The New York Canon

2008-04-11T07:52:00.001-07:00

From Jerry Saltz for New York Magazine's 40th Anniversary

"A canon is antithetical to everything the New York art world has been about for the past 40 years, during which we went from being the center of the art world to being one of many centers. I skipped some art in which New York itself figured prominently—I hated Christo’s The Gates, and I didn’t like Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc either—and instead chose artists who threw New York curves, who changed the context of making art here. I left out the influential German artists who landed here en masse in the eighties, like clowns from a Volkswagen. There were too many, and they weren’t our clowns. I could have added Julian Schnabel; he’s a great New York huckster who gives people fits, but Jeff Koons goes him one better. Paula Cooper opened the first Soho gallery, and the Guerrilla Girls changed institutions—but omit an artwork in favor of a dealer or a group? In the end, an individual thing that made me open my eyes anew always won."

Read his list here.

Twombly in the Land of Michelangelo

2008-04-11T07:36:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times:

"A new museum is under construction in Rome, nicknamed Maxxi, designed by Zaha Hadid. A museum opened not long ago in Bologna called Mambo. (Italians love their acronyms.) The Prada Foundation has just bought an exhibition space in the south of Milan; Rem Koolhaas will be that architect. And in the north of Milan there’s Hangar Bicocca, a vast former Pirelli factory devoted to gigantic installations; Anselm Kiefer’s, an awesome series of towers built of tottering concrete blocks, has justly become a pilgrimage site.

In Naples, Madre, a contemporary museum, does first-rate shows. Now it has a new place. So does the Maramotti family, which owns Max Mara, a clothing company. This winter the Maramotti children opened a foundation in a converted factory on an improbable stretch of loveless industrial and office buildings in Reggio Emilia to house the collection of their late father.

More is happening in Turin, where the Castello di Rivoli has long reigned as the premier museum of contemporary art in Italy. And after years of dawdling, Venice has recently turned its customs house over to François Pinault, the French billionaire who already has the Palazzo Grassi and says he will use them both to show off his collection. That’s hardly the best way for any city to take up new art, but it says something about Italy that Pinault chose Venice over Paris, which wanted him."

Whitney Sampler

2008-03-13T09:53:00.000-07:00

The 2008 Biennial, the seventy-fourth in the series of Whitney Annual and Biennial exhibitions held since 1932, presents eighty-one artists working at a time when art production is above all characterized by heterogeneity and dispersal. However, within the enormously differentiated field that we (perhaps absurdly) continue to yoke under the term “contemporary art,” certain prevalent modes of working and thematic concerns are particularly germane to the moment.

Many of the projects presented in the exhibition explore fluid communication structures and systems of exchange that index larger social, political, and economic contexts, often aiming to invert the more object-oriented operations of the art market. Recurring concerns involve a nuanced investigation of social, domestic, and public space and its translation into form—primarily sculptural, but also photographic and cinematic. Many artists reconcile rigorous formal and conceptual underpinnings with personal narratives or historical references. While numerous works demonstrate an explicit or implicit engagement with art history, particularly the legacy of modernism, as well as a pronounced interest in questioning the staging and display of art, others chart the topography and architecture of the decentralized American city and take inspiration from postindustrial landscapes and urban decay. Using humble or austere materials or employing calculated messiness or modes of deconstruction, they present works distinguished by their poetic sensibility as they discover pockets of beauty in sometimes unexpected places.

There is an evident trend toward creating work of an ephemeral, event-based character, in the form of music and other performance, movement workshops, radio broadcasts, publishing projects, community-based activities, film screenings, culinary gatherings, or lectures. Such projects do not stand in opposition to institutions; rather, considering each of these multiple platforms equally important, artists show objects in the museum or gallery even as they seek ways to complicate and transcend its parameters. In this spirit, from March 6–23 the 2008 Biennial continues at Park Avenue Armory with an extensive program of events and performances. (Including a 26 minute video by Stanya Kahn and Harry Dodge).

Across media, much work in this year’s Biennial concerns politics although its mode of address is often oblique or allegorical. Persistence, belief, and a desire to locate meaning threads through these many modes and activities rooted in what feels like a transitional moment of history. Rather than positing a definitive answer or approach, these artists exhibit instead a passion for the search, positioned in the immediate reality of our uncertain sociopolitical times.

The New York Times Review

Bert Rodriguez's Therapy installation (For five hours a day, until the end of the Biennial at the armory on March 23, Mr. Rodriguez is seeing patients inside his box at the armory, an installation called “In the Beginning... .”)

Julia Meltzer and David Thorne Video-sampling Syria

From New York Magazine The Facebook Biennial: How social networks have taken over this year’s Whitney festivities.

Cai Gou-Qiang

2008-03-13T09:42:00.000-07:00

Cai Guo-Qiang, I Want To Believe at the Guggenheim thru May 28th.

New York Times review

Time Out: New York review

"CAI GUO-QIANG has literally exploded the accepted parameters of art making in our time. Drawing freely from ancient mythology, military history, Taoist cosmology, extraterrestrial observations, Maoist revolutionary tactics, Buddhist philosophy, gunpowder-related technology, Chinese medicine, and methods of terrorist violence, Cai’s art is a form of social energy, constantly mutable, linking what he refers to as “the seen and unseen worlds.” This retrospective presents the full spectrum of the artist’s protean, multimedia art in all its conceptual complexity.

Born in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China, in 1957, Cai studied stage design at the Shanghai Drama Institute. In the 1980s he emerged as a member of the burgeoning experimental art world of China’s postreform era. After moving to Japan in 1986, Cai tapped into a rich vein of international 20th-century art and critical thought. While living there, he mastered the use of gunpowder to create his signature gunpowder drawings and the related outdoor explosion events. These practices integrate science and art in a process of creative destruction and reflect Cai’s philosophy that conflict and transformation are interdependent conditions of life, and hence art. At once intuitive and analytical, his gunpowder drawings and explosion events are intrepid, conceptual, site specific, ephemeral, time based, and interactive—performance art with a new matrix of cultural meaning.

Cai has lived in New York since 1995. While increasing his participation in the global art system of biennials, public celebrations, and museum exhibitions around the world, Cai’s social projects engage local communities to produce art events in remote, nonart sites like military bunkers, a socialist utopianism influenced by Cai’s experience growing up in Mao Zedong’s Red China and during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76. His recent work has expanded to include large-scale installations, allegorical and sculptural, that recuperate signs and symbols of Chinese culture and expose the dialectics of local history and globalization.

Designed by the artist as a site-specific installation, the Guggenheim’s exhibition presents art as a process that unfolds in time and space, dealing with ideas of transformation, expenditure of materials, and connectivity. The structure of Cai’s art forms are inherently unstable, but his social idealism characterizes all change, however violent, as carrying the seeds of positive creation. Subverting tropes such as East versus West, traditional versus contemporary, center versus periphery, Cai offers a new cultural paradigm for the art of a global age and expands the meaning of the phrase “I want to believe.”

Design and the Elastic Mind

2008-03-13T07:45:00.000-07:00

Design and the Elastic Mind runs at the MoMA thru May 12, 2008

View the online exhibition

Pre- and post-visit materials for educators

View all related events

New York Times Review

In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change. Designers have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease as science and technology evolve. Several of them—the Mosaic graphic user's interface for the Internet, for instance—have truly changed the world. Design and the Elastic Mind is a survey of the latest developments in the field. It focuses on designers' ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use.

The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design. Of particular interest will be the exploration of the relationship between design and science and the approach to scale. The exhibition will include objects, projects, and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological scale. The objects range from nanodevices to vehicles, from appliances to interfaces, and from pragmatic solutions for everyday use to provocative ideas meant to influence our future choices.

Three

2008-03-13T07:31:00.000-07:00

Jacob Lawrence at DC Moore Gallery thru March 22nd

Eleanor Antin at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts thru March 15th

Joy Garnett at Winkleman Gallery thru March 15th

NYT reviews Kahlo show at PMA

2008-03-13T07:27:00.000-07:00

"PHILADELPHIA — You really should come down, a friend e-mailed me this summer from Mexico City. She meant, come down for the Frida Kahlo centennial, with a retrospective at the Palacio de Bellas Artes and displays of memorabilia at Casa Azul, the Blue House, Kahlo’s home. You should come, she wrote, not just for the art, which looks fabulous, but for the place, the people.

Tens of thousands of Mexicans, young and old, rich and poor, had been standing in line for hours to get a glimpse of Kahlo’s paintings and her personal relics: her snapshots, her brushes, her ashes, the steel orthopedic corsets she wore under her peasant blouses and skirts to hold a wrecked body together.

The celebration, one gathers, was not the usual Fridamaniacal crush. It was more a fiesta, a devotional jubilee, an hommage to a Mexican saint in the city where she was born in 1907 and died in 1954. I couldn’t make the trip, but suspect that the essential Kahlo experience is the same anywhere. Through her art, we travel her life, a shining path of high Modernist adventure and a Via Crucis of physical pain, political passion and amorous torment. Basically, she felt what we all feel, only hugely, terribly. This is what makes her the people’s artist she is. And what makes her, to those who don’t get her extremist vibe, a romantic cliché.

The lines are also long for “Frida Kahlo” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a distillation of the centennial show, with 42 of Kahlo’s small number of surviving paintings and a slew of photographs. As surveys go, it’s modest and compact, but for that reason quickly absorbed. That’s the way Kahlo enters your system, fast, with a jolt, an effect as unnerving, and even repellent, as it is pleasurable.

Organized by the Kahlo biographer Hayden Herrera and by Elizabeth Carpenter of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the show opens with a single painting, “Self-Portrait With Monkeys” (1943). Kahlo presents herself in half-length, her now-mythical attributes precisely detailed: the handlebar eyebrows, the faint mustache, the dark hair pulled up in a sculptural pile. She’s coolly self-contained, but she has company: a quartet of puckish monkeys. One hugs her neck; another tugs at her blouse, as if feeling for a breast. She is unperturbed. She is a nature deity, mistress of beasts; these creatures are her subjects and children. They are also her equals, her friends. She is one of them." Read the rest here.

Barbara T Smith

2008-03-13T07:17:00.000-07:00

From the press release

Barbara T. Smith on view through March 21, 2008

Maccarone Gallery is pleased to present, Barbara T. Smith, an exhibition of two not-widely-shown early works considered masterpieces of those years. Smith has become critically known within the trajectory and forefront of West Coast performance art of the late 1960's and early 1970's, and as a sustained contributor to the feminist movement. The projects on view at maccarone hold true to a rigorous practice based on the notion of experience and interaction, pioneering transitional works that broke with traditional form. As Smith's marriage and home life began to splinter in the 1960s, she transitioned to a lifestyle consumed by art making. Autobiography and the creation of community via relations with her audience and peers became vital to Smith's art, exploring themes of the body, ritual, nurturing, sexuality, female desire, spiritual transformation, love and death. This operative handling of the body and personal storytelling in contemporary art was an early challenge to the conventional patriarchal narrative.

The Black Paintings, a series from 1965 of primarily black surfaces under 3/8 inch-glass, each generate a striking reflection of the individual situated before its void. Faint minimalist shapes can be detected on each facade; a red triangle on the vertical edge or a white dot floating in space for example. By offering painting as mirror, Smith physically forces viewer into self-reflection, thus mandating an exploratory confrontation with the work and the locus of the art experience. In contrast to the archetypal act of the gaze, the mirror effect becomes so powerful that its renderings hinder access to the painting itself. In these "performative surfaces" the viewer concurrently acts as both a figure on the picture plane and one who is part of the surrounding environment.

Situated in the gallery's center is Smith's existing edition of the monumental sculptural project Field Piece, 1968/72, the artist's visualization of a giant field of grass. This highly labor-intensive sculpture in today's world appears industrially-made, however Smith and her team completed every element by hand. A sequence of tall, hollow grass blades made from colorful translucent resin function as an implication of infinity. If The Black Paintings contend with mental containment then Field Piece, in its assertion of an unbounded physical experience, performs in direct conceptual opposition. As the viewer moves through the work, each blade illuminates. Calling to mind Smith's performative actions using her own body as medium, with Field Piece the viewer is instantaneously the activator, affecting their surroundings and triggering light with their very presence. With this process Smith calls upon the viewer to participate and assume responsibility for his or her own art experience, and succumb to human vulnerability. The artist in this manner achieves one the most cherished and often unattainable 1960's utopian ideals; in Field Piece everyone is treated equal.

Barbara T. Smith studied painting, art history and religion as an undergraduate at Pomona College, and she received her MFA from University of California, Irvine in 1971 where she and fellow artists founded the notorious experimental gallery called F-Space. Recent exhibitions include "Barbara Smith" at The Box gallery Los Angeles (2006), "The 21st Century Odyssey Part II: The Performances of Barbara T. Smith", a retrospective shown at the Pomona College Museum of Art (2005), as well as several group exhibitions currently including "Art Since the 1960s: California Experiments" at the Orange County Museum of Art, "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" PS1 Contemporary Art Center, now on view thru May, 2008.

Amy Cutler

2008-03-13T07:03:00.000-07:00

Amy Cutler Alterations at Leslie Tonkonow through April 5th

The enigmatic imagery of Amy Cutler’s paintings and drawings is transformed into three dimensions in her first major work of sculpture. Alterations consists of 120 cast and painted female figures placed on top of and around a long wooden table.

The figures placed along the perimeter of the tabletop were cast wearing corduroy dresses and clogs, sitting on round stools wrapped with braided hair, with their arms extended in front of them. A complex web of strings wrapped around their arms connects each sculpture to a corresponding unraveling figure on the floor. These hydrocal casts feature the exquisite detail characteristic of all of Amy Cutler's work. Having painted the individual faces in gouache, Cutler renders each with a separate character and expression. A solitary lamp hanging from the ceiling illuminates the emotional theater in this poignant interplay of shadow and form.

Alterations was commissioned by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, and exhibited there from July 3 through September 10, 2007. The work will enter the museum’s permanent collection at the close of this special New York presentation. Four unique hand-colored lithographs, created for the installation in Spain, will also be on view.

The New York Times review at the bottom of this page.

Be Kind, Rewind...for real...thru March 22nd.

2008-03-13T06:56:00.000-07:00

"Michel Gondry’s current exhibition at Deitch Projects in SoHo is more than an extravagant promotion for the new movie he wrote and directed, “Be Kind Rewind.” This project, also called “Be Kind Rewind,” is a serious but flawed effort to carry over into the real world the film’s idealistic, anti-commercial fantasy of do-it-yourself creativity.

In the film, ... a couple of dopey fellows played by Mos Def and Jack Black create their own wacky remakes of mainstream movies. (The tapes in the neighborhood video store, where Mos Def’s character is temporarily in charge, have been erased by the magnetized body of Mr. Black’s character.) Naturally, their remakes turn out to be a hit with the local customers.

For Deitch Projects, Mr. Gondry has built a system in which people can make their own communal movies in the cheerfully amateurish style personified by his cinematic heroes. In the gallery’s garage-size industrial space, behind a painted exterior replicating the film’s decrepit storefront, is a miniature version of a Hollywood back lot. Different sections mimic a doctor’s office, a restaurant, a junkyard and so on.

Groups of 5 to 15 people, who must register in advance, follow a structured program to complete a short movie in two hours. Mr. Gondry’s written step-by-step instructions direct the group first to appoint a leader and a camera person, then decide on the film’s genre, define its characters and determine the plot. Next, group members chart the action scene by scene and create signs for the titles and credits. Then they select props and costumes from a motley assortment on hand. Finally, using a small video camera provided by the gallery, they shoot their movie, editing as they go. Finished movies are added to the stock in the imitation video store at the front of the gallery, where they can be viewed by visitors on a widescreen television."

More here.

Bjarne Melgaard

2008-03-13T06:43:00.000-07:00

Bjarne Melgaard at Green Naftali thru March 15.

"There’s a lot going on in Bjarne Melgaard’s third solo show in New York: neo-Neo-Expressionist painting and an extended image-text piece; modernist sofas and rustic Norwegian antiques; textile design and automatist drawing; weird sex (on video) and painted references to same; exuberance and tragedy. Above all, there are parody and sincerity so close together as to be indistinguishable.

In the large, colorful paintings, groups of priapic, noseless men are layered with thickly painted images of monsters and phrases like “Gay Mafia,” “Snuff Cube” or “Ben Gazzara.” Some of the monsters seem to be made of dozens of penises (or maybe they’re just cigarettes); the paint handling ranges from black lines that could almost be Warhol silk-screen to Schnabelesque masses of oozing color. If you wonder how they might look over the couch, Mr. Melgaard’s “sculptures” are luxurious sofas by the Viennese designer Josef Hoffmann and chairs by Frederick Kiesler. But they are upholstered with neo-Expressionist textiles of his design; two of the couches come with large mink throws.

The installation piece, “Greenland, a novel,” which has the feeling of a sad, art-house movie, is a fragmented tale of rape and bisexuality scrawled on torn pieces of paper. These — along with snapshots that focus mostly on a blond woman — are taped to a connoisseur-worthy cluster of beautiful Norwegian peasant tables and chairs that also display ceramics, painted boxes, wood coffee pots and carved Inuit figurines. The story is vague but larded with often wrenching physical detail.

Mr. Melgaard’s bad-boy reputation is working overtime in this mélange, celebrating and ridiculing art as painting, as design, as shopping and as life. It’s a big, beautiful, materialistic mess, with the “Greenland” installation providing an undertow of real feeling."

ROBERTA SMITH

Color as Field: American Painting, 1950–1975 at the Smithsonian

2008-03-13T06:33:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times

"Starting in the late 1950s the great American art critic Clement Greenberg only had eyes for Color Field painting. This was the lighter-than-air abstract style, with its emphasis on stain painting and visual gorgeousness introduced by Helen Frankenthaler followed by Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski.

With the insistent support of Greenberg and his acolytes, Color Field soared as the next big, historically inevitable thing after Jackson Pollock. Then over the course of the 1970s it crashed and burned and dropped from sight. Pop and Minimal Art, which Greenberg disparaged, had more diverse critical support and greater influence on younger artists. Then Post-Minimalism came along, exploding any notion of art’s neatly linear progression.

Now Color Field painting — or as Greenberg preferred to call it, Post-Painterly Abstraction — is being reconsidered in a big way in “Color as Field: American Painting, 1950-1975,” a timely, provocative — if far from perfect — exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum here. It has been organized by the American Federation of Arts and selected by the independent curator and critic Karen Wilkin. She and Carl Belz, former director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, have written essays for the catalog." More here.

Podcasts—Larry Poons in Conversation with Karen WilkinThe American Federation of Arts produced a series of video podcasts to accompany the exhibition. Artist Larry Poons discusses his career, his influences, and reminisces about other Color Field painters in a series of eight interviews recorded in New York in 2007.

Loris Greaud

2008-03-13T06:17:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times

"EVEN an artist who likes to fool around with spatiotemporal dimensions can get stressed out by a deadline. Last month technicians were working day and night to prepare for the opening of Loris Gréaud’s “Cellar Door” project at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, but Mr. Gréaud was visibly anxious that it would not be ready on time.

The strain was understandable. Mr. Gréaud, barely 29, is the first artist to take over all 40,000 square feet of this prestigious contemporary-art center. He has devoted two years to the realization of his exhibition, and the budget for the project has turned out to be double what any other show there has cost.

The director, Marc-Olivier Wahler, admitted it was an “all or nothing gamble” to give carte blanche to such a young and relatively inexperienced artist. Yet when the two started planning the undertaking, Mr. Wahler said, “it became clear that his project was so large and encompassed so many different systems, he had to have the whole space.” (Mr. Gréaud, his gallery and the filmmaker Claude Berri, who bought an artwork, helped defray the costs.)
What Mr. Gréaud has done with it is both enchanting and mind-blowingly conceptual. Like Alice down the rabbit hole, visitors enter through a black door that glides open automatically as they approach. Once inside they wander through the artist’s strange, dark universe, divided into various attractions called bubbles.

A vending machine sells candies that taste like nothing. A passage leads under a crumpled resin ceiling that was molded from the earth after a subterranean fireworks explosion — as Mr. Gréaud explained, a “celebration and manifestation of underground activity.” A steel-and-mesh structure reveals paintball warriors shooting at one another with pellets in the patented blue developed by the artist Yves Klein as the color of the immaterial.

Yet in a reflection of Mr. Gréaud’s artistic process, the work will change as it travels to other locations. It will remain at the Palais de Tokyo through April 27 and reappear in totally different forms at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Yvon Lambert gallery in New York, San Francisco’s CCA Wattis Institute and the gallery of Michael Benevento in Los Angeles."

More here.

Chiharu Shiota

2008-02-12T12:43:00.000-08:00

From New York Magazine.

"The Japan-born, Berlin-based artist Chiharu Shiota has made a strong U.S. solo debut with Waiting, an entangled installation of wool thread and the charred remains of wooden chairs, at Goff + Rosenthal through March 10. Spider-Man-gone-bad in appearance, a bit haunting in feel, the work brings to mind cobwebby attics and the ruins of postwar Germany (another version is installed permanently in the Museum für Neue Kunst in Freiburg). Plus it’s one of those obviously labor-intensive pieces of art that make some viewers scratch their heads in wonder and say, how on earth? We asked Shiota to explain for us.

1. The Thread“In 1992, I used threads for the first time,” says Shiota. “I was studying painting then, and used the black wool for drawing in the air … If I weave something and it turns out to be ugly, twisted, or knotted, then such must have been my feelings when I was working.”

2. The LatticeworkIn terms of shape, Shiota finds triangles to be most effective. “A line is too clear,” she says, “too visible. Triangles upon triangles become complicated, hiding some things from the eye.” Her webs are not unlike the intricate rope systems used in Japanese gardening to shield trees from snowfall. “When I walk in the park and look at trees in the wintertime it always seems like my work,” she says. “It looks similar, but has a different meaning.”

3. The RelicsFor the German Waiting, the burned chairs came from a girls’ school built in 1902; these, which Shiota wanted to be “more neutral,” came from Bushwick’s Green Village Used Furniture & Clothing, a.k.a. Sidney’s. The concept harks back to a childhood memory of a neighbor’s burning house. “The chairs have no function, but their existence is stronger than before. They are still waiting for someone to sit down.”

4. The Corner SpaceUsing a corner of the exhibition space has prompted much art-world discussion in the past, as it’s considered difficult to manage. (An entire exhibition at Andrea Rosen last month was devoted to corners.) Though the Freiburg version of Waiting is positioned in the center of the gallery, Shiota chose a corner here to create the illusion of depth and to establish distance between work and audience.

5. The Charring“In Berlin, Chiharu just made a pile of chairs outside of her apartment, burned them in the street. It was no big deal,” says Mike Egan, director of operations at Goff + Rosenthal, who helped fabricate the piece. “If I tried to do that here, the FDNY would probably take me out.” Egan blackened this group of chairs safely away from the city, at a friend’s ranch upstate.

6. The Onsite WorkWorking with one assistant, Shiota spent two and a half days completing Waiting. Her process of gluing, knotting, and tacking down threads is often regarded as performative in nature. As Berlin curator Steffi Goldmann has said, “Perhaps her production is sustained by a desire to contain her own inner perturbation and her often overpowering anxiety.”

Barbara Bloom

2008-02-12T12:32:00.000-08:00

Now at the International Center for Photography:

The Collections of Barbara Bloom thru May 4. Read the New York Times review here.

"Photographer, designer, and installation artist Barbara Bloom (b. 1951) has built her career out of questioning appearances, exploring the desire for possessions, and commenting on the act of collecting. This retrospective will explore all aspects of her oeuvre, and includes works from past multi-media installations and newly made pieces, as well as objects from her vast personal archives of ephemera and advertisements. In some cases, Bloom revisits previous installations and adds new elements, resisting the delineation between past and present in her work. She often integrates her photographs with furniture to create compelling scenes, as with the installation Greed (1988) from the ICP collection, comprised of a chair, an empty frame, and her own photograph of a museum gallery showing a guard in a chair. An example of one of her "collections" is a complete set of Vladimir Nabokov's writings, with all the book covers redesigned by Bloom. This refers not only to herself as collector, and Nabokov as collector (he obsessively collected his own books), but herself as artist."

Cristina Lei Rodriguez

2008-02-12T12:27:00.000-08:00

From Time Out: New York:

"If you didn’t get enough of the latest in funky new sculpture at the New Museum’s “Unmonumental” show, you’re in for a treat with Cristina Lei Rodriguez’s debut solo exhibit at Team Gallery. Her outsize assemblages employ seemingly discarded materials, just like Isa Genzken’s colorful, haphazard pieces—only Rodriguez uses artificial foliage and paint to evoke a tropical forest gone haywire.

“Overrun” is a series of treelike sculptures, the largest of which are 12 feet tall; they’re coated in several layers of vibrant epoxy paint and shiny plastic jewels, including hanging strands of gold chains. Another group, “Contained,” consists of six Plexiglas boxes installed on a wall, each filled with fake ferns and other plants. From a distance, the cases look like toxic terraria, but on closer inspection, it’s easy to identify their phony nature."

Read the rest here.

Four Reviews

2008-02-12T11:44:00.000-08:00

Read here for reviews of the following four shows.

Chris Martin at Mitchell-Innes & Nash through March 1.

Richard Morris Hunt’s Architectural Drawings from the École des Beaux-Arts and the Gates of Central Park at the National Academy Museum through April 20.

Mark Bradford at Sikkema Jenkins & Company through Feb. 23.

Larry Poons at Jacobson Howard through Feb. 25.

Jasper Johns: Gray

2008-02-05T08:24:00.000-08:00

February 5, 2008–May 4, 2008 at the Met.

"The exhibition examines the use of the color gray by the American artist Jasper Johns (b. 1930) between the mid-1950s and the present. It brings together more than 120 paintings, reliefs, drawings, prints, and sculptures from American and international collections. Johns has worked in gray, at times to evoke a mood, at other times to evoke an intellectual rigor that results from his purging most color from his works. This exhibition is the first to focus on this important thematic and formal thread in Johns's career and includes some of the artist's best-known works, such as Canvas, Gray Target, Jubilee, 0 through 9, No, Diver, and The Dutch Wives, as well as works from the artist's Catenary series and new paintings never before exhibited.Accompanied by a catalogue."

View images from this exhibition. Read the New York Times profile and review.

Welcome to New Mexico. Now Create.

2008-02-05T08:18:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times:

"These tourists had not come to New Mexico on vacation but on something of a creative mission: to develop site-specific projects for the 2008 Site Santa Fe Biennial, works that will be installed either in the exhibition’s 15,000-square-foot main gallery or around town this summer. Although the exhibition does not open until late June, the creative process began this month, as 22 artists from almost as many countries converged on Santa Fe for a week of reconnaissance.
They were here getting to know the Site team, one another and the region, complete with its picturesque architecture — one artist called it “Santa Fake” — and its multicultural history. (Only two artists in the show were not able to make the trip. They will fly out later this winter.)"

Read the rest here.

Archive Fever

2008-02-05T08:08:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times

"After an autumn of large, expert, risk-free museum retrospectives, the time is right for a brain-pincher of a theme show, which is what “Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art” at the International Center of Photography is.

Organized by Okwui Enwezor, an adjunct curator at the center, it’s an exhibition in a style that’s out of fashion in our pro-luxe, anti-academic time, but that can still produce gems. The tough, somber little show “Manet and the Execution of Maximilian” at the Museum of Modern Art last year mixed grand paintings with throwaway prints and demanded a commitment of time and attention from its audience. The payoff was an exhibition that read like breaking news and had the pull of a good documentary. It was the museum’s proudest offering of the season."

Read the rest here.

Artists include:

Organized by renowned scholar and ICP Adjunct Curator Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art will present works by leading contemporary artists who use archival documents to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss. Over the past thirty years, successive generations have taken wide-ranging approaches to the photographic and filmic archive. The works presented here take many forms, including physical archives arranged by peculiar cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums, and photomontages composed of historical photographs. These images have a wide-ranging subject matter yet are linked by the artists' shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive.

Artists include:
Christian Boltanski, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jef Geys, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Craigie Horsfield, Lamia Joreige, Zoe Leonard, Sherrie Levine, Ilán Lieberman, Glenn Ligon, Robert Morris, Walid Raad, Thomas Ruff, Anri Sala, Fazal Sheikh, Lorna Simpson, Eyal Sivan, Vivan Sundaram, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbona, Andy Warhol.

Last Year at Marienbad

2008-02-05T07:37:00.000-08:00

"WHEN Alain Resnais's gorgeous puzzle box of a movie, ''Last Year at Marienbad,'' [reopened at] Film Forum ..., New York cinephiles [may have found] themselves as mystified and delighted as their counterparts were when the film first reached Manhattan in 1962. ''Marienbad'' either does or does not tell the story of what may or may not be a love triangle that does or does not end violently, though the movie could also be presenting shards of a dream, a memory or a fantasy. What transpires among the three nameless principal characters is, the filmmakers have always maintained, up to you to figure out.

The visual style of ''Marienbad,'' with its use of glamorous, glazed-looking actors framed in mannerist poses within the glittering, implicitly decadent mirrored salons of a luxe European hotel, may no longer dazzle audiences that have seen it cribbed (and spoofed) by countless perfume ads and rock videos. But the movie's nightmarishly looping, repetitive semi-narrative, drenched in incantatory voice-over and toxically discordant organ music, is as disturbing as ever and retains its power to frustrate anybody who hopes to shake loose some answers after 93 minutes. The people who walked out (literally) of ''Inland Empire,''David Lynch's ''Marienbad''-influenced 2006 film, saying ''What was that all about?'' will find similar though more elegantly concise cause for discomfort here. "

Read the rest here.

Accidental Modernism

2008-02-05T07:21:00.000-08:00

Diana Thater at David Zwirner gallery thru February 9th.

" For her fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, Diana Thater has created two room-size installations that examine the intangible and dimensionless relationship between humans and the natural world through the ancient art of falconry. Emerging with the birth of civilizations - with origins in the Middle East and Central Asia, hunting with trained birds of prey flourished in the courts of medieval Western Europe and Great Britain, carrying with it enormous cultural and social capital. Divorced from its symbolic articulation of social and political power, the practice survives today among a small yet dedicated population of falconers. Committed to working within local environments, Thater invited fifteen California falconers to a stone amphitheater in the Santa Monica Mountains, where she documented the diverse and personal bonds between the falconers and their individual birds. Filming from above, the crane-operated camera surveys the arena while the avian participants remain grounded. Along with this footage, Thater will project large-scale still images of the sun and moon. Just as expectations of movement are reversed with the flying camera and stationary birds, Thater defies color conventions by tinting the sun blue and the moon gold. "

Read "The Ritual of Chess, a Decoder of Life" here.

Emerging

2008-02-05T07:11:00.000-08:00

From New York Magazine:

"One of the good things about the supposedly evil art boom—setting aside for the moment the notion that it may be destabilizing right now— is that underknown mid-career artists are getting second chances at recognition. In November, Mary Heilmann, who is 67 and whose work has always been respected but never A-listed, scored the covers of Artforum and Art in America simultaneously. Today, she’s the subject of a traveling retrospective, selling paintings for upwards of $200,000. Amy Sillman, 52, made the cover of Artforum last February, and her prices have reached $85,000. After decades of neglect, Marilyn Minter, now 59, not only ended up in the last Whitney Biennial; her work was featured on the cover of that show’s catalogue, and her paintings now sell for more than $130,000. Recent seasons have seen the reemergence of Robert Bechtle, Olivier Mosset, and Michael Smith, all of whom, along with Heilmann, will be in this spring’s Whitney Biennial." read the rest here.

Shirin Neshat

2008-02-05T07:03:00.000-08:00

Shirin Neshat at Barbara Gladstone Gallery thru February 23.

"In adapting the magical realism of Parsipur’s fantastic retelling of the 1953 coup d’etat in which the CIA reinstalled the Shah of Iran, Neshat continues a project she began in 2003. Neshat dissects the individual narrative threads of Parsipur’s interwoven tale of five Iranian women as they each seek freedom from their oppressive lives. Their struggle parallels that of their nation, a country in crisis fighting for a sense of independence from foreign forces. Neshat’s project is two-pronged, consisting of a feature length film as well as a series of video installations exploring the psychologies of the five main female characters."

Time Out: New York reviews it here.

Keith Edmier 1991-2007

2008-01-15T13:01:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-15T12:51:00.000-08:00

"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

2008-01-15T12:46:00.000-08:00

"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

2008-01-15T12:36:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-15T12:25:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-15T12:15:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-15T12:05:00.000-08:00

"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

2008-01-15T11:54:00.000-08:00

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."

Women at the MoMA

2007-12-04T08:03:00.000-08:00

Where Are All the Women? On MoMA’s identity politics. By Jerry Saltz

"Each fall since MoMA’s reopening in November 2004, I’ve gone to these two floors, counted the number of artworks on view, tallied the number of women artists included, and then pitched a fit in print. So many women artists had come to light over the past few decades that MoMA’s reopening in 2004 became an enormous opportunity to alter its monolithic version of modernism. There was ample evidence that MoMA wanted to do so in 2000, when the permanent collection was totally rethought. Even the usually conservative chief curator of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield, admitted that previous MoMA installations had been “less real than ideal,” adding that the museum now wanted to investigate “multiple narratives.” It sounded as though the institution was on a slow but steady road to equal time."

More from New York Magazine. Plus, Is MoMA the worst offender? Tally of how women fare in six other art-world institutions.

Times

2007-12-04T07:33:00.000-08:00

Three articles from the New York Times

A Broken City. A Tree. Evening.
Holland Cotter writes about Paul Chan’s production of “Waiting for Godot,” set in the badly damaged Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans.

You Can’t Hold It, but You Can Own It
Tino Sehgal's art is completely immaterial; it can be bought and sold without involving any objects whatsoever. Mr. Sehgal creates what he calls “staged situations”: interactive experiences that may not even initially declare themselves as works of art.

Shh! It’s a Secret Kind of Outside Art "Since James Turrell bought the 400,000-year-old, two-mile-wide crater in 1979 and began moving tons of earth to carve out different kinds of viewing chambers and tunnels — making his art of light, sky and astronomical events instead of, say, paint and canvas — anticipation has been building. Writers have compared it to Stonehenge and the Mexican pyramids.

The question is when will it be finished. After early reports that it would be completed in the late 1980s, that date has been pushed back several times for financial and artistic reasons. Some suspect that the monumental work will be “finished” only with the artist’s death."

new New Museum

2007-12-04T07:09:00.000-08:00

The New Museum moves to the Bowery

From New York Magazine

"I can’t remember there ever being more hope and goodwill toward an art institution than there is right now for the New Museum, as it moves into its new $64 million building on the Bowery. Partly this is because the New Museum, despite having been something of a local mascot over the 30 years since its founding, has never quite hit its stride; it has usually bounced between being audacious and being annoying. Partly it’s because other New York museums have been so uneven about contemporary art. MoMA is adrift, the Guggenheim’s leaders continue to make terrible decisions, and the Brooklyn Museum is a giant wasted opportunity. The general feeling is, this is the New Museum’s last best chance to get it right."

The New York Times also reviews the new building as well as the opening show, Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century.

Art in Review

2007-12-04T06:53:00.000-08:00

The New York Times reviews ....

Charles Ray at Matthew Marks Jan 19th

George Baselitz at Gagosian (24th Street) thru Dec 22nd

Adrian Paci at Peter Blum and Smith-Stewart

Duke Riley at Magnan Projects and Magnan Emrich Contemporary thru Dec 22nd

Douglas Gordon

2007-12-04T06:46:00.000-08:00

Douglas Gordon

Self-Portrait of You + Me, After the Factory

Gagosian Gallery Through Dec. 15

"Unlike “24-Hour Psycho,” a signature work in which Douglas Gordon slowed down Hitchcock’s classic horror film to create a glacially paced but mesmerizing spectacle, here he resorts to splashier measures. Mr. Gordon has taken commercially available posters of Warhol’s icon paintings, burned them and mounted the remains on mirrors.

The initial impression is of a Warhol-besotted art school project that borrows heavily from the slash-and-burn aesthetic of punk. The cringe factor increases as the checklist describes the materials with apparently unironic pretension as “smoke and mirrors.” The grotesque leanings recall Dada collages or the work of Linder, a British punk and postpunk singer and artist who had a retrospective this summer at P.S. 1. But when you walk into the main gallery, painted and carpeted in black, and witness a few dozen of these charred Jackie, Elvis, Marilyn and Muhammad Ali images — as well as Warhol self-portraits — staring back at you with your reflection in the mirrors, the effect is oddly powerful, like a glimpse into the blaze as a contemporary Rome burns.

Does it matter that Mr. Gordon is a Scotsman? Not really. The question is whether, in borrowing from Warhol, Mr. Gordon adds enough to make the exchange worthwhile. Warhol’s icon paintings themselves functioned as burnt-out shells, holding up a mirror to the country at perhaps its most Narcissus-like moment. Mr. Gordon’s show feels gimmicky, leaning heavily on the tired legs of Warhol and punk subversiveness, but the installation does offer an over-the-top nihilist update." MARTHA SCHWENDENER, New York Times.

The Risk of Serious Injury or Death

2007-12-04T06:37:00.000-08:00

"Urs Fischer has reduced Gavin Brown’s Enterprise to a hole in the ground, and it is one of the most splendid things to have happened in a New York gallery in a while.

A 38-foot-by-30-foot crater, eight feet deep, extends almost to the walls of the gallery, surrounded by a fourteen-inch ledge of concrete floor. A sign at the door cautions, THE INSTALLATION IS PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS AND INHERENTLY INVOLVES THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH; intrepid viewers can, all the same, inch their way around the hole. Fischer’s pit is titled You, and it took ten days to build, costing around $250,000 of Brown’s money. (Heaven only knows what his landlord thought of it.)"

Runs thru December 22nd

The New York Times also has a review here.

New York

2007-11-29T11:45:00.000-08:00

"With artists zipping around the globe and the political map in constant flux, is an exhibition that focuses on the art of a single country a viable concept?

“Senso Unico,” a show of eight contemporary Italian artists at P.S. 1, confronts this issue head on. Its title echoes the Italian sign designating a one-way street. But a museum handout suggests that “Senso Unico” be translated as “unique feeling” and that viewers look for this quality in each of the artists, who express themselves in distinct languages."

Read more here.

Detroit

2007-11-29T11:38:00.000-08:00

"For the artist Julie Mehretu, who grew up largely in East Lansing, Mich., the Detroit Institute of Arts and other vintage downtown landmarks have the cast of magnificent relics.
“For me the issues that come up with Detroit — as this Modernist city that is in many ways abandoned or erased, all the changes it’s gone through and the very different kinds of communities that have affected that — are really interesting,” she said in an interview at her studio in New York.

Today the institute is in the process of unerasing itself. On Nov. 23 it is to reopen to the public after a $158 million expansion by the architect Michael Graves. Curators are reinstalling the museum’s encyclopedic collection, remolding the way the public experiences the art in the hope of attracting new visitors.

In tandem with the opening the museum invited Ms. Mehretu, 36, to address Detroit in some way by creating work for galleries adjacent to the Rivera frescoes.
She produced five new paintings, joined by seven other recent Mehretu works called “City Sitings.” “Diego’s murals also deal with these issues — in a very different time — of what Detroit was,” Ms. Mehretu said. “That overlap and conversation make it an exciting place to do a show.”

Ms. Mehretu’s personal history is entwined with the exhibition as well. Born in Ethiopia to an American mother and Ethiopian father who is an economic geographer, she lived the immigrant’s experience when her family moved in the late 1970s to East Lansing for her father’s teaching position at Michigan State University. She was 7 years old."

Read more here.

Oakland

2007-11-29T11:22:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times

"WHEN the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his shop, Frederick Meyer, a German-born cabinetmaker with links to the Arts and Crafts movement, turned disaster into opportunity. The next year he and his wife, Laetitia, opened the School of the California Guild of Arts and Crafts with 3 teachers and 43 students. They had $45 in the bank and a vision of providing rigorous training to fine artists and craftsmen alike.
That school is now the California College of the Arts, a remarkable Bay Area institution that while perhaps unfamiliar outside the region has played an important role in shaping the past 100 years of California art.

“From the beginning the unity of arts and crafts was the most important principle at C.C.A., just like it would be at the Bauhaus, which was established 12 years later,” said Peter Selz, professor emeritus of art history at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1959, while a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he exhibited two little-known painters with connections to the college, Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliveira.

Both those successful artists are now among the 100 alumni and faculty members whose work is in “Artists of Invention: A Century of C.C.A.,” on view until March 16 at the Oakland Museum of California. It is a wide-ranging exhibition of diverse work: Not far from Mr. Diebenkorn’s elegant canvas is a funky ceramic woman by Viola Frey, one of Robert Bechtle’s photorealist street scenes and a video of compressed television images by Anthony Discenza. In an adjoining space a colorful 1995 Squeak Carnwath painting hangs within sight of a muscular abstract sculpture in blue-gray stoneware by Peter Voulkos and Garry Knox Bennett’s pivotal 1979 work, “Nail Cabinet,” an exquisite wood cabinet he deliberately vandalized by driving a nail into its front."

Read more here.

Martin Puryear

2007-11-07T09:41:00.000-08:00

The Martin Puryear retrospective will be on view at the MoMA thru January 14, 2008.

From the New York Times

"Mr. Puryear, who was born in 1941 and grew up in Washington, D.C., is a former painter who emerged from the Minimalist and Postminimalist vortex making hand-worked, mostly wood sculptures. These soothe more than seethe, balancing between the geometric and the organic with Zen aplomb.

Mr. Puryear is a formalist in a time when that is something of a dirty word, although his formalism, like most of the 1970s variety, is messed with, irreverent and personal. His formalism taps into a legacy even larger than race: the history of objects, both utilitarian and not, and their making. From this all else follows, namely human history, race included, along with issues of craft, ritual, approaches to nature and all kinds of ethnic traditions and identities.
These references seep out of his highly allusive, often poetic forms in waves, evoking the earlier Modernism of Brancusi, Arp, Noguchi and Duchamp, but also carpentry, basket weaving, African sculpture and the building of shelter and ships. His work slows you down and makes you consider its every detail as physical fact, artistic choice and purveyor of meaning.

The MoMA show, which has been organized by John Elderfield, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, is quite beautiful and conveys Mr. Puryear’s achievement persuasively. With 40 works on the sixth floor and 5 more on the second-floor atrium level, it displays a lack of repetition unusual in these product-oriented times. Of the five in the atrium, two are attenuated sculptures that reach upward several stories, making new use of that tall, awkward space. “Ladder for Booker T. Washington” from 1996 is a wobbly ladder whose drastic foreshortening makes it seem to stretch to infinity."

Back to the Days of Painting With Dancing Feet

2007-11-07T09:23:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times

"To hear the choreographer Deborah Hay talk, there is no overstating the connection between visual art and dance in New York in the 1960s, when the Judson Dance Theater movement was radically questioning the nature of performance.

“Year after year after year you would follow the openings, and the growth of an artist,” she recalled, ticking off names like Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Robert Morris. “I could feel myself being altered chemically by what it was that I was looking at.”

New Yorkers can see the results on Nov. 13, when a video of two of Ms. Hay’s pioneering 1968 dances will be shown for the first time during Performa 07, the second biennial festival of new visual art performance, which opens today. Performa seeks to rekindle connections between the arts through discussions, screenings and new work."

Kara Walker at the Whitney

2007-11-07T08:50:00.000-08:00

Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love is now on view at the Whitney thru 2/3/2008. Relevant links can be found below.

New York Magazine - An article profiling Kara Walker and her work.
New York Magazine - Jerry Saltz's review, "An Explosion of Color, in Black and White".
The New York Times - Holland Cotter reviews Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love in "Black and White, but Never Simple".
The New York Times - "Silhouettes and Film", a slideshow of selected works from the exhibition.
Newsday - "Review: Kara Walker at the Whitney Museum" by Ariella Budick.
Bloomberg News - "Kara Walker's Silhouettes Tell Tales of Sex, Race, and White Power" by Linda Yablonsky.
The Washington Post - "Symbols of Hatred in the Shadows" by Robin Givhan.
The Columbia Daily Spectator - "At Any Age, Walker Still Packs a Punch" by Merrell Hambleton.

Louvre

2007-11-07T08:44:00.000-08:00

"The Louvre Now Accepts the Living" by Amy Serafin in the New York Times.

"ON a recent Tuesday inside the Louvre, the German artist Anselm Kiefer was standing on a piece of scaffolding high in the air, relaying instructions to a group of men manipulating a crane. Carefully they hoisted a mound planted with a dozen atrophied aluminum sunflowers into an oversize niche in the wall.
The mound is part of a major art installation by Mr. Kiefer, the first permanent contribution to the Louvre’s décor since Georges Braque painted the ceiling of Henri II’s former antechamber in 1953. It goes on view Thursday in a stairwell linking the Egyptian and Mesopotamian antiquities in the museum’s Sully wing. "

Young Masters

2007-11-07T08:30:00.000-08:00

New York Magazine (very) briefly profiles 10 "Young Masters", a "Portrait gallery of ten of the most promising New York artists to have emerged from the boom."

Drawing Center

2007-11-07T08:19:00.000-08:00

Alan Seret: Gang Drawings and Kristine Roepstorff: Its not the eyes of the needle that changed are both on view at The Drawing Center thru 2/7/2008

Going

2007-11-07T08:03:00.000-08:00

Three shows at the end of their runs.

Karin Schneider--Image Coming Soon at Orchard thru 11/11.

Karen Yasinsky -- "L'Atalante" at Mireille Mosler thru 11/17.

Isaac Julien -- Western Union: Small Boats at Metro Pictures thru 11/17.

All three are reviewed in this New York Times article, right after Revolutions and Daphne Fitzpatrick.

Gone

2007-11-07T06:12:00.000-08:00

Two shows that are no longer up, but you can still read about them.

The late Steven Parino's show at Gagosian. Jerry Saltz writes about it for New York Magazine.

Saltz also writes The Elephant in the Room: Why you should give a crap about Chris Ofili's new paintings. Ofili's show was at David Zwirner.

2007-10-05T07:35:00.000-07:00

"LEGO-- The last 50 years the Danish building industry has been exclusively devoted to prefabrication. Denmark has become a country built from LEGO bricks. Rather than seeing the modular mania as a straightjacket, this project is a homage to Danish building industry. By turning the site in to a modular matrix of 12X12ft we created an elastic field of peaks and valleys. A thousand plateaus ascending and descending, separating and merging to form a fluid space of private and public plateaus. Combining the rigorous and the adventurous. The box and the blob. "

This is part of CPH Experiments, "an exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC thru Nov 24 2007. BIG is a Copenhagen based group of over 80 architects, designers, builders and thinkers operating within the fields of architecture, urbanism, research and development. BIG’s architecture emerges out of a careful analysis of how contemporary life constantly evolves and changes. In their projects, BIG tests the effects of size and the balance of programmatic mixtures on the triple bottom line of the social, economical and ecological outcome. Like a form of programmatic alchemy, they create architecture by mixing conventional ingredients such as living, leisure, working, and shopping."

ICA at Penn

2007-10-05T07:14:00.000-07:00

Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia thru December 16th

Ensemble

"A group exhibition of works that make sound, guest curated by artist and musician Christian Marclay. ...Likening his approach to that of a composer, Marclay has chosen a variety of sculpture and installations based on their sound quality and compatibility to sonically inhabit the same large first floor gallery. Visitors are invited to interact with some of the works, others are triggered by motion detectors, or set on timers. The installation will create an ambient sound environment, intermittently producing a wide range of sounds, from the very quiet notes of a music box to the loud ringing of a bronze bell."

"Participating artists include: Terry Adkins, Doug Aitken, Darren Almond, John M. Armleder, Fia Backström, Harry Bertoia, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Angela Bulloch, Martin Creed, David Ellis, Mineko Grimmer, Tim Hawkinson, Jim Hodges, Evan Holloway, Pierre Huyghe, Paul Ramirez-Jonas, Nina Katchadourian, Martin Kersels, Jon Kessler, Katja Kölle, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Carolee Schneemann, Noah Sheldon, Yoshi Wada and Angela White, among others

Eileen Neff: Between Us

"This exhibition of over thirty photographs by the Philadelphia artist Eileen Neff will be on view in the second floor gallery from September 7-December 16, 2007. Focusing on the past ten years, the exhibition traces a fascinating and critical shift from the camera to the computer."

Project Space: Jay Heikes
"For his first museum show, Jay Heikes will produce a unique installation in the Project Space which may include the following elements: a cement and brass "bed of nails," a digital cuckoo clock, a freezer wall, drawings and a stylized rat trap. These elements are among the "props" used to activate stories, puns, and a kind of deadpan humor that have appeared in past iterations of an ongoing work inspired by a rather arcane joke."

Ramp Project: Taalman Koch, Fly Thru

"This is the 13th commission in ICA's Ramp Project Series and is also the first to invite architects to address this challenging space: the Los Angeles team of Linda Taalman and Alan Koch."

Two thru the 13th

2007-10-05T06:56:00.000-07:00

Ryan Trecartin at Elizabeth Dee Gallery.

"The debut of Ryan Trecartin's new video, ''I-Be Area,'' is the best thing that could have happened to the New York fall art season. Almost any slice of its 100-minute running time radiates more new-feeling energy than a dozen shows in the surrounding blocks. Painting, sculpture, installation, performance -- ''I-Be Area'' has it all, as well as language: a fictional but real language of murderous non sequiturs buried in sitcom teenage prattle. " New York Times Review.

and T.J. Wilcox at Metro Pictures.

"T. J. Wilcox's short films weave cinematic, personal and historical material into uniformly grainy, flea-market documentaries. (Mr. Wilcox films in Super-8 from a television monitor, transferring the footage to digital video for editing and finally to 16 millimeter for projection). In his third solo at the gallery, his films range from shallow glamour shots to a dreamlike re-enactment of a powerful childhood experience." New York Times Review.

Two from the Times

2007-10-04T07:33:00.000-07:00

Two articles from the New York Times...

In Finding Your Way Around the Rembrandts, Holland Cotter guides us through the exhibition "The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art."

and in A Collector's Keen Eye for Modernists, Roberta Smith reviews "Abstract Expressionism and Other Modern Works," also on view at the Met.

Turner and Schama

2007-10-04T07:26:00.000-07:00

Simon Schama profiles J.M.W. Turner in the New Yorker .

"Poor old Turner: one minute the critics were singing his praises, the next they were berating him for being senile or infantile, or both. No great painter suffered as much from excesses of adulation and execration, sometimes for the same painting. “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon Coming On” had, on its appearance at the Royal Academy, in 1840, been mocked by the reviewers as “the contents of a spittoon,” a “gross outrage to nature,” and so on. The critic of the Times thought the seven pictures—including “Slavers”—that Turner sent to the Royal Academy that year were such “detestable absurdities” that “it is surprising the [selection] committee have suffered their walls to be disgraced with the dotage of his experiments.” John Ruskin, who had been given “Slavers” by his father and had appointed himself Turner’s paladin, not only went overboard in praise of his hero but drowned in the ocean of his own hyperbole. In the first edition of “Modern Painters” (1843), Ruskin, then all of twenty-four, sternly informed the hacks that “their duty is not to pronounce opinions upon the work of a man who has walked with nature threescore years; but to impress upon the public the respect with which they [the works] are to be received.” Read more here.

Duchamp of the Muscle Car

2007-10-04T07:17:00.001-07:00

The New York Times profiles Richard Prince, who's "Mr. Prince’s dark, funny, enigmatic work will be the subject of a 30-year retrospective... at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. And though he did not make the clay car, he seriously considered putting it front and center in the show. In the end his reasons for changing his mind had more to do with humility than originality: he thought the car was too powerful a work of art in its own right. Read the rest here.

Roberta Smith reviews the show here.

Back to the Figure

2007-10-04T07:06:00.000-07:00

Peter Doig, Dana Schutz, Barnaby Furnas, Neo Rauch, Katherine Lee and Elizabeth Neel are all profiled in Back to the Figure from the October issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

James Turrell

2007-10-04T07:01:00.000-07:00

"Standing on the rim of an ancient volcanic crater in northern Arizona, with the Painted Desert as a spectacular backdrop, James Turrell surveys all he has wrought. For a quarter of a century, this 60-year-old artist has been transforming the crater into an immense naked-eye observatory." Read more.

Gordon Matta-Clark

2007-10-04T06:47:00.000-07:00

Check out Dwell Magazine's profile of Gordon Matta-Clark.

"His presence in the art world was brief, but Gordon Matta-Clark’s site-specific “cuttings”are some of the 20th century’s most engaging explorations of architecture—and they’re not even standing. "

Eyebeam.org

2007-10-03T12:47:00.000-07:00

"Eyebeam is an art and technology center that provides a fertile context and state-of-the-art tools for digital research and experimentation. It is a lively incubator of creativity and thought, where artists and technologists actively engage with culture, addressing the issues and concerns of our time. Eyebeam challenges convention, celebrates the hack, educates the next generation, encourages collaboration, freely offers its contributions to the community, and invites the public to share in a spirit of openness: open source, open content and open distribution.

The atelier model is fundamental to the concept of Eyebeam. The studio/workspace environment, in which the energies of artistic production, education and curatorial practice fuse, provides a unique, stimulating and vital working context for creating art. This tremendous energy, along with the dialogue exchanged between curators, artists and students of various practices and stages of development, can inform and inspire the creation of artworks that may not previously been imagined or produced."

UpcomingWorkshops and Events: This Fall's To-Do list
New from our Labs
Inside Outside: Eyebeam fellows strut their stuff in the Jersey City artist tour
Hip-Hop Pop-Up: Rap visuals in real time
Bocce Drift: Come Out and Play turns the city into a bocce course
Closed due to evaluation: Steve Lambert closes McDonald's for a day Apply now! Eyebeam's Winter 2008 Call for Residents extended
Eyebeam Community
Stephanie Rothenberg up North: The School of Perpetual Training and Mobile City
McKenzie Wark: 50 Years of Recuperation at The Buell Evening Lecture
LoVid features: Per Square Foot, Electric Lab

Caspar Stracke, urban particle supercollider, 2007
Interference: Exhibition opening party and performance this Thursday! Artist operatives tackle collective intelligence
September 27 – November 10, 2007Opening 6PM Thursday, September 27: 8PM VJ Performance by Caspar Stracke, Benton-C Bainbridge, and Angie Eng.

Artists: Forays, Angie Eng, Jill Magid, Carrie Dashow, Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg, Trevor Paglen, IAA, neuroTransmitter, Robert Ransick, Yury Gitman, Carlos J. Gómez de Llarena, Graffiti Research Lab, Caspar Stracke, Eyebeam R&D Lab, Michael Frumin, Jonah Peretti

Interference is the second of three exhibitions celebrating 10 years of Eyebeam support for artists experimenting with new technologies. Employing a diverse array of media and strategies, which includes data visualization, performance, community engagement and public intervention, the artists and collectives featured in Interference probe ideas of access and autonomy.
From the very public, but deliberately obscured, satellite surveillance data recorded in Paglen and IAA’s work tracking CIA aircraft, to the intimacy of Magid’s collaboration with a local NYC police officer; from Forays’ engagement with local community gardeners, to GRL, Gómez de Llarena and Gitman’s tools for communication, the projects in Interference ask us to seriously consider concepts of communal space in an increasingly privatized public sphere. – Amanda McDonald Crowley, Executive Director

Minister of Fear

2007-10-03T12:34:00.000-07:00

The New York Times Magazine profiles "controversial" film director Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher, Cache) in Minister of Fear.

"Making waves...is what Haneke has become famous for. Over the last two decades, the director has developed a reputation for stark, often brutal films that place the viewer -- sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly -- in the uncomfortable role of accomplice to the crimes playing out on-screen. This approach has made Haneke one of contemporary cinema's most reviled and revered figures, earning him everything from accusations of obscenity to a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art next month. ''Funny Games,'' the movie Haneke was shooting in New York and Long Island, is the American remake of a highly controversial film by the same name that he directed in 1997. It was from its beginnings targeted at the American moviegoing public -- and no other word but ''targeted'' will do. ''Funny Games'' is a direct assault on the conventions of cinematic violence in the United States, and the new version of the film, with its English-speaking cast and unmistakably American production design, makes this excruciatingly clear. More surprising still, Haneke remade this attack on the Hollywood thriller for a major Hollywood studio, Warner Independent Pictures, and refused to alter the original film's story in the slightest. "

Artists Space

2007-10-03T12:13:00.000-07:00

Current shows at Artists Space

In the Main Space: On Being an Exhibition

October 12-December 8, 2007

Opening Reception: October 11th, 6-8pm

Curated by Joseph del Pesco
Artists Include BGL, Conrad Bakker, Beth Campbell, Germaine Koh, Valerie Hegarty, Isola and Norzi, Chadwick Rantanen, Derek Sullivan, Jackie Sumell, Anne Walsh/Chris Kubick, Lee Walton, Laurel Woodcock

CAMPARI Project Space: Judit Kurtág Episode

Architecture and Design Space: Jackie Sumell / Herman Wallace The House That Herman Built

Re-engineering Engineering

2007-10-03T12:10:00.000-07:00

"WHEN NONENGINEERS THINK ABOUT ENGINEERING, it’s usually because something has gone wrong: collapsing levees in New Orleans, the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. In the follow-up investigations, it comes out that some of the engineers involved knew something was wrong. But too few spoke up or pushed back — and those who did were ignored. This professional deficiency is something the new, tuition-free Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering wants to fix. At its tiny campus in Needham, Mass., outside Boston, Olin is trying to design a new kind of engineer. Most engineering schools stress subjects like differential calculus and physics, and their graduates tend to end up narrowly focused and likely to fit the stereotype of a socially awkward clock-puncher. Richard K. Miller, the president of the school, likes to share a professional joke: “How can you tell an extroverted engineer? He’s the one who looks at your shoes when he talks to you.” Olin came into being, Miller told me last spring in his office on campus, to make engineers “comfortable as citizens and not just calculating machines.” Olin is stressing creativity, teamwork and entrepreneurship — and, in no small part, courage. “I don’t see how you can make a positive difference in the world,” he emphasized, “if you’re not motivated to take a tough stand and do the right thing.”

Read the rest here.

Weather Report: Art & Climate Change

2007-10-03T11:41:00.000-07:00

SEPTEMBER 14 - DECEMBER 21, 2007 -- "Weather Report: Art and Climate Change" is an exhibition curated by internationally renowned critic, art historian, and writer Lucy R. Lippard. It is a collaboration between the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and EcoArts.

“We have the highest density of climate scientists in the world in the Boulder-to-Broomfield corridor,” said Marda Kirn, who runs EcoArts, an interdisciplinary arts organization here. Her group is a driving force behind “Weather Report: Art and Climate Change,” an ambitious new art show at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. “We have buildings full of climate scientists,” she added, as if climatology Ph.D.’s were stacked like rolls of paper towels at Costco.

For the show dozens of artists, including Agnes Denes, Mary Miss, Subhankar Banaejee, Andrea Polli, Joel Sternfeld, Iain Baxter and Chris Jordan, were asked to join with scientists to create pieces about climate change. Some of the artists had been collaborating with scientists for years; Ms. Kirn matched other artists with scientists from the Boulder area. “The artists had to be very specific about the questions they wanted to ask and the research they were doing,” she said. “Matching them with scientists was almost like setting up dates.”

Her idea — to create an interdisciplinary show on global warming — enticed the art critic Lucy Lippard to step into the curator’s role for the first time in 15 years. “It’s a killer — it’s the hottest topic, so to speak,” said Ms. Lippard, 70, who in her long career has championed Conceptual Art, public art and feminism in books including “The Pink Glass Swan” and “The Lure of the Local.”

Read the rest here.

What the Beats were about.

2007-10-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

Read Louis Menand's New Yorker article called Drive, He Wrote. It's a meditation on the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's On The Road.

Sculpture Center

2007-09-12T08:18:00.000-07:00

Three shows at the Sculpture Center, all thru 11/25

Jeppe Hein: Illusion

New In Practice Projects: new works by Nina Lola Bachhuber, Richard Bottwin, Edward Kihn, Paul & Wilkin, Cesare Pietroiusti, Willoughby Sharp, Nolan Simon, Elisabeth Smolarz, Mary Ellen Strom & Ann Carlson

Scott Lyall: the little contemporaries

The Drawing Center

2007-09-12T08:05:00.000-07:00

Starting September 14th and running thru October 18th, The Drawing Center presents Non-Declaritive Art, featuring the work of thirteen emerging artists selected from the Viewing Program.

The artists in Non-Declarative Art intelligently explore ambiguity, the minimization of information, and the rejection of overt meaning. Participating artists include: Susan Goethel Campbell, Gianna Commito, Michael Diaz, Jeff Feld, Sabine Finkenauer, Prajakti Jayavant, Steven Lowery, Howard Rosenthal, Jay Sheldon, Jered Sprecher, John Tallman, Sally Tittmann, and Gregor Wright.

Running at the same time is Jon Kessler: Works on Paper , the artist’s first exhibition of drawing-based work.

Ceramics

2007-09-12T07:23:00.000-07:00

Makers and Modelers: Works in Ceramics is at the Gladstone Gallery thru October 13th. Roberta Smith has a review.

Artists in the exhibition include Elizabeth Peyton, Thomas Schütte, Anish Kapoor, Ricky Swallow and Sarah Lucas.

Zhang Huan

2007-09-12T07:13:00.000-07:00

Zhang Huan: Altered States is on view at the Asia Society thru January 2008.
Holland Carter has a review.

Dana Schutz

2007-09-12T07:03:00.000-07:00

A New York Times review from Spring about Dana Schutz's show at Zach Feuer.

Profile Banks Violette

2007-09-12T06:52:00.000-07:00

Read this New York Magazine profile of Banks Violette. He had a collaborative exhibition at both the Team and Galdstone galleries this summer. The New york Times reviewed it here.

Quick 2

2007-09-12T06:28:00.000-07:00

Also at the MoMA (thru September 24th ) is Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years.

At the website you can view the online exhibition , Listen to the audio tour: (Full Program (Flash 7 or higher plug-in required), Download audio and video clips, and read the New York Times article about the installation.

New York Magazine has an article about Serra here and a review here. The New Yorker has one too.

Quick

2007-09-12T06:16:00.000-07:00

...it ends on the 17th, but the MoMA's show "What is Painting?" features a 50 artist 50 work exhibition presenting a selection of artworks made since approximately 1965, including a number of recent acquisitions and many works displayed for the first time since the Museum's reopening.

New York Magazine's Jerry Saltz reviews the show in "Back from the Brink"

You can read the Village Voice review here.

Back at it

2007-09-12T06:10:00.000-07:00

...School's back in session and so is Current. New posts will go up through out the day, and we'll be running through the entire school year. For those of you new to Current, we're the blog version of Jody Pinto's print current events folder that is located in the Library at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. With this blog, you can check out all of Jody's recommendations for shows in the New York area, as well as links to galleries and articles of interest. We update every couple of weeks. We hope its helpful for you. Enjoy.

PS1

2007-04-24T11:48:00.000-07:00

Now at PS1

Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker thru 4/29

Not For Sale thru 4/30

Silicone Valley thru 4/30

International and National Projects: Joe Deutch, Stefan Eins, McKendree Key, Mark Lewis, David Maljkovic, Senam Okudzeto thru 4/30

Katrín Sigurdardóttir: High Plane V thru 5/7

Tom Sandberg: Photographs 1989-2006 thru 5/7

Vik Muniz: Reflex thru 5/7

Whitney

2007-04-24T11:40:00.000-07:00

Now at the Whitney

Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar thru June 24, 2007
For this project, artist Taryn Simon (b. 1975) assumes the dual role of shrewd informant and collector of curiosities, compiling an inventory of what lies hidden and out-of-view within the borders of the United States. She examines a culture through careful documentation of diverse subjects from across the realms of science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security, and religion.

Lorna Simpson thru May 6, 2007
One of the leading artists of her generation, Lorna Simpson is well known for her photographic and film works, which often examine racial and gender identity. In works such as Call Waiting (1997), she depicts people of color engaging in intimate yet incomplete conversations that elude easy interpretation but seem to plumb the mysteries of identity and desire. Organized by the American Federation of Arts, this comprehensive first mid-career survey will feature her image and text works, serigraphs on felt, film installations, and a selection of recent work.

Gordon Matta-Clark thru June 3, 2007

During the brief but highly productive ten years that he worked as an artist, and even more so since his death, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) has exerted a powerful influence on artists and architects who know his work. This retrospective brings together the breadth of his practice to reveal the unique beauty and radical nature of his punnings, plans, performances, and interventions evident in the many media in which he worked: the sculptural objects (most notably from building cuts), drawings, films, photographs, notebooks, and documentary material.

Click here to listen to a podcast about Gordon Matta-Clark and his work.

Terence Koh thru May 27, 2007
For his first solo museum show in the United States, Terence Koh is creating a new installation for the Whitney's Lobby Gallery. In Koh's immersive, typically monochromatic environments -- in which minimalist and baroque aspects of his sensibility vie for dominance -- a seemingly unknown ritual is about to take place, where a sense of loss simultaneously suggests regeneration. From drifting powder silencing rooms, and constellations of cryptically linked objects that move from literally disjunctive realms (upstairs/downstairs, inside/outside, dark/light) as well as more conceptual ones, to pristine, perfectly crafted containers that become coffins for shattered glass and mirror, the glitter of black beads, burnt objects, residing within -- Koh's gestures evoke isolation and secrecy, but also protection and ecstasy.

CCCP

2007-04-24T11:27:00.000-07:00

CCCPFRÈDÈRIC CHAUBIN (Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed)

On view April 24 - May 26 at Storefront for Art and Architecture

From the website--"Over the past five years, during the course of his travels in the former Soviet Union, French photographer Frederic Chaubin has documented an extensive collection of startling architectural artifacts born during the last two decades of the Cold War. Architects in the peripheral regions of the Eastern Bloc countries, working on governmental commissions during the ‘70s and ‘80s, enjoyed a surprising degree of creative freedom. Operating in a cultural context hermetically sealed from the influence of their Western counterparts, they drew inspiration from sources ranging from expressionism, science fiction, early European modernism and the Russian Suprematist legacy to produce an idiosyncratic, flamboyant and often imaginative architectural ménage. Unexpected in their contexts, these monumental buildings stand in stark contrast to the stereotypical understanding of late Soviet architecture in which monotonously repetitive urban landscapes were punctuated by vapid exercises in architectural propaganda.
The subjects of Chaubin’s photographs, scattered throughout Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, were all constructed during the last two decades of the Soviet era. Very few of their designers achieved anything more than local recognition, and until now these buildings have never been collectively documented or exhibited. The authors of many works remain unknown, and some have been destroyed since Chaubin’s photographs were taken. Concieved and executed during a moment of historical transition, they constitute one of the most surprising and least known legacies of the former USSR.
As well as presenting the architecture itself, CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed traces the intellectual and political undercurrents that act as a backdrop, and at times inspiration, for the work of these Soviet architects. The exhibition, a compendium of film stills, drawings, magazine articles and historical timelines, maps out the complex genealogy of this overlooked but compelling chapter in the history of 20th century design." --Frédéric Chaubin in Paris, France. He is editor in chief of the French lifestyle magazine Citizen K.

Philosophy of Time Travel

2007-04-24T11:18:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reviews "Philosophy of Time Travel", on display at The Studio Museum in Harlem thru July 1st.

A team of five artists is exploring this idea with a large-scale installation, Philosophy of Time Travel, opening April 11, 2007, at The Studio Museum in Harlem. The installation evokes the work of modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), forcefully and dynamically pushing his massive 1938 work, Endless Column, through the Studio Museum’s gallery space. The result is a fictional world in which history comes to life, crashes through the exhibition space, and traverses through histories of art and museums.

Sol LeWitt 1928-2007

2007-04-24T07:39:00.000-07:00

The New York Times Obituary for Sol LeWitt can be found in a "bootlegged" form here.

Some of his work is on display now thru September 10th.

1 2 3: All Three Part Variations on Three Different Cubes, 1967/2003

and Sol LeWitt Drawing Series at Dia Beacon.

You can read a review here.

Picasso Braque Movies

2007-04-23T08:05:00.000-07:00

When Picasso and Braque Went to the Movies By Randy Kennedy

"IT was Picasso doing the noninterview interview, decades before Warhol came along to elevate it to an art form. In 1911 a writer for Paris-Journal was asking Picasso about the radically new kind of painting people were calling Cubism, the lightning bolt that had shot forth from his studio and that of his friend Georges Braque. Picasso claimed never to have heard of such a thing. “Il n’y a pas de Cubisme,” he said blithely, and then excused himself to go feed his pet monkey.

In part because its creators said so little about it during their lifetime, guarding it like a kind of state secret, Cubism has generated a library’s worth of scholarship, probably more than any other artistic innovation in the last century. The general picture that has emerged is one of Cubism bubbling up out of a thick Parisian stew of symbolist poetry, Cézanne, cafe society, African masks, absinthe and a fascination with all things mechanical and modern, mostly airplanes and automatons.

But while almost every aspect of these two artists’ live has been scrutinized — their friends, lovers, favorite drugs, hangouts, hat sizes and nicknames (Picasso called Braque Wilbourg, after Wilbur Wright) — one mutual fascination has been largely overlooked: Both men were crazy about the movies.

They were also coming of age artistically in the city of the Lumière brothers, where the modern moviegoing experience had just been born, starting in cafes and cabarets and then moving into theaters, packed with people still in disbelief as they watched a two-dimensional picture plane leap to life. “The cinema was not simply in its earliest infancy,” wrote the critic André Salmon, one of Picasso’s friends and fellow moviegoers. “It was wailing.”

For more than 20 years the New York art dealer Arne Glimcher had carried around a theory, more gut feeling than scholarly conjecture, that Picasso and Braque had been seduced by that siren song of the early cinema, and that Cubism, with its fractured surfaces and multiple perspectives, owed much more to the movies than anyone had noticed.

Five years ago Mr. Glimcher finally decided to do something about his hunch." (more here).

The Jewish Museum

2007-04-23T07:41:00.000-07:00

Dateline Israel : New Photography and Video Art at the Jewish Museum thru 8/5.

The New York Times reviews it here.

ICP

2007-04-23T07:37:00.000-07:00

Henri Cartier-Bresson's Scrapbook: Photographs 1932-1946

at the International Center for Photography

Dia: Beacon

2007-04-23T07:33:00.000-07:00

Agnes Martin: Homage to [a] Life: Paintings 1990-2004 at Dia: Beacon thru 11/26.

Bronx Museum

2007-04-23T07:25:00.000-07:00

Here and Elsewhere: Artist in the Marketplace 27th Annual Exhibition
at the Bronx Museum thru 8/19

Bami Adedoyin • Becca Albee • Fanny Allié • Jesse Alpern • Dorthe Alstrup • Gabriela Alva Cal y MayorJill Auckenthaler • Gail Biederman • Hector Canonge • Christine Catsifas • Jillian ConradVince Contarino • Jon Cuyson • Caroline Falby • Tracey Goodman • Patrick Grenier • Emily HallJoseph Hart • Ketta Ioannidou • Elaine Kaufmann • Jayson Keeling • Taeseong Kim • Joseph MaidaAmanda C. Mathis • Amanda Matles • Megan Michalak • Hiroyuki Nakamura • Alison OwenChihcheng Peng • David Politzer • Emily Puthoff • Jenna Ransom • Rashanna Rashied-WalkerJason Reppert • Joseph Eli Tekippe • Will Walker

Here and Elsewhere features a range of work by 36 artists from throughout the [New York] metropolitan area, all of whom have participated in the most recent incarnation of Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, one of the most celebrated and competitive programs for emerging artists in the country. The title alludes to both the global reach of the program, now in its 27th year, and to the fluidity of art practices in today’s global life.

Audio Tour

Hugo Boss 2006

2007-04-23T07:21:00.000-07:00

The Hugo Boss Prize 2006 Tacita Dean

at the Guggenheim thru 6/6.

Drawing Center

2007-04-23T07:13:00.000-07:00

Gego, Between Transparency and the Invisible and

William Anastasi: Raw at the Drawing Center thru 7/21

Shows

2007-04-23T06:47:00.000-07:00

Gordon Matta Clark and Rirkrit Tiravanija

at David Zwirner thru 5/21

Mel Chin at Frederieke Taylor thru 5/19

Walter De Maria at Gagosian thru 5/5

Liliana Porter at Hosfelt thru 5/12

Paul Thek at Alexander and Bonin thru 5/12

Through the 28th

2007-04-23T06:26:00.000-07:00

Teresita Fernandez at Lehman Maupin

"Pure" (Marina Abramovic, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Duchamp, Iran do Espírito Santo, Dan Flavin, Adam Fuss, Liam Gillick, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jim Hodges, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Shirazeh Houshiary, Bethan Huws, Callum Innes, Joseph Kosuth, Wolfgang Laib, Luisa Lambri, Sherri Levine, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Joseph Marioni, Piero Manzoni, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rita McBride, Anthony McCall, Robert Ryman, Julião Sarmento, Kiki Smith, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Frank Thiel, Gavin Turk, Rachel Whiteread, Jeff Zimmerman) at Sean Kelly

Roleplay: Feminist Art Revisited 1960-1980 at Galerie Lelong

Pieree Bismuth at Mary Boone

Mary Lucier at Lennon Weinberg

James Turrell at PaceWildenstein

Amy Cutler at Tonkonow

Kim Dingle at Sperone Westwater

Artists Space

2007-03-27T12:45:00.000-07:00

Four Shows thru May 12 2007 Opening Reception: Thursday March 30, 6-8pm

MAIN SPACE:
KIOSK (XIX) – Modes of Multiplication
Kiosk is a traveling archive of independent publication projects on contemporary art which is continually growing and changing and which currently comprises approximately 360 publishers, periodicals, zines, video and audio projects –– altogether around 5,300 publications.
Curated by Christoph Keller

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PROJECT SPACE: REALLIFE 1979-1990
Curated by Kate Fowle

REALLIFE Magazine: 1979-1990
When Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan started REALLIFE Magazine in 1979, they wanted to make a publication that would be "by and about artists." The magazine’s first issue was made possible by an NEA grant in art criticism, awarded to Lawson through Artists Space. During the 1980s, REALLIFE Magazine attentively addressed current art and its influences while continuously speculating about culture and questioning politics.
Curated by Kate Fowle, REALLIFE Magazine: 1979-1990 looks at the decade through the lens of this publication and its extraordinary roster of contributors—including Richard Baim, Eric Bogosian, Glen Branca, Critical Art Ensemble, Jamie Davidovich, Jessica Diamond, Mark Dion + Jason Simon, Jack Goldstein, Kim Gordon, Group Material, David Hammons, Michael Hurson, Ray Johnson, Mike Kelley, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Sol Lewitt, Robert Longo, Ken Lum, Allan McCollum, Paul McMahon, Matt Mullican, Adrian Piper, Richard Prince, David Robbins, John Roberts, Cindy Sherman, Michael Smith and James Welling.

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PROJECT SPACE: Hunter Reynolds Patina du Prey's Memorial Dress: 1993 to 2007
Curated by Cay-Sophie Rabinowitz and Christian Rattemeyer

Hunter Reynolds is a visual artist and AIDS activist. He was a an early member of ACT UP, and in 1989 co-founded Art Positive, an affinity group of ACT-UP to fight homophobia and censorship in the arts. For over twenty years, Reynolds has been using photography, performances, and installations to express his experience as an HIV-positive gay man living in the age of AIDS. Reynolds’ works address issues of gender identity, political, social, and sexual histories, mourning and loss, survival, hope and healing.
For his project space at Artists Space, Reynolds presents Patina du Prey’s Memorial Dress, a black ball gown onto which the names of thousands of AIDS victims are printed in gold. The dress stands on a stage rotating to music composed by Edmund Campion, while viewers are invited to write comments and the names of lost friends and loved ones into a memorial book.
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CAMPARI PROJECT SPACE:

Richard Massey Caution: Five hungry Soviet cows are in the garden
Curated by Christian Rattemeyer

For many years, Miami-based graphic designer Richard Massey has been researching the re-use of Modernism’s most iconic expressions for design applications. One notable example is his design for Cabinet Magazine’s logo, which is derived from the fragmented elements and ligatures of an early 20th century stencil often used in Le Corbusier’s architectural drawings and manifestoes.
In his new project at Artists Space—Caution: Five hungry Soviet cows are in the garden—Massey explores ideologies of neutrality in modernist type design.

Short Reviews

2007-03-27T12:25:00.000-07:00

Nan Goldin at Matthew Marks (thru April 14), Josiah McElheny at the MoMA (thru April 9). Michael Landy at Alexander and Bonin (thru March 31), Jennifer Nocon at Tracy Williams Ltd. (thru April 21) and Leo Villareal at Gering & Lopez (thru April 28) are all reviewed here.

Global Feminisms

2007-03-27T12:07:00.000-07:00

"In celebration of the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the Brooklyn Museum presents Global Feminisms (thru July 1st), the first international exhibition exclusively dedicated to feminist art from 1990 to the present. The show consists of work by approximately eighty women artists from around the world and includes work in all media—painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, installation, and performance. Its goal is not only to showcase a large sampling of contemporary feminist art from a global perspective but also to move beyond the specifically Western brand of feminism that has been perceived as the dominant voice of feminist and artistic practice since the early 1970s.This exhibition is arranged thematically and features the work of important emerging and mid-career artists."

Roberta Smith has a review.

Added April 23rd:

Peter Schjeldahl on "Global Feminisms"

Mark Stevens on The History of Herstory

Drawing Center

2007-03-20T07:41:00.000-07:00

Two exhibitions at the Drawing Center.

Levity: Selections Spring 2007 (thru March 31st)
Esteban Alvarez, Ingólfur Arnarsson, Norma-Jean Bothmer, Anne Daems, Ivana Franke, Bill Gerhard, Kate Joranson, Irene Kopelman, Jiha Moon, Mio Olsson, Michelle Oosterbaan, Lisa Perez, Eduardo Santiere, and Rachel Perry Welty.

Yona Friedman: About Cities (thru April 7, 2007)
"Visionary architect and artist Yona Friedman is one of the most important and influential figures working in the fields of sustainable and self-initiated architecture. For his first U.S. solo exhibition, Friedman will present a spatial collage of his series of drawings from 1980, “A Better Life in Towns,” as well as re-workings of his noted “Spatial City” drawings from 1958. Utilizing simple, everyday materials, Friedman will create an installation in the Drawing Room in collaboration with Normal Architecture Office that foregrounds his concerns with flexible, utilitarian, and portable design."

Clyfford Still

2007-03-20T07:29:00.000-07:00

Unfurling the Hidden Work of a Lifetime recounts the temporay viewing of Clyfford Still's estate.

"2,393 works [of Clyfford Still]— [have] been hidden from public view for decades. Most of it has never been seen by the public at all, thanks to the fierce privacy and bilious contempt for the art world of its creator, the Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still, who died in 1980 at 75. Despite the relative obscurity of the work, art experts estimate that the collection could fetch more than $1 billion if it ever comes to market, which it probably never will.
The works in question make up the entire estate of this artist. He left behind a one-page will, nearly 95 percent of the work he ever made (he sold or gave away only 150 pieces in his lifetime) and a widow determined to follow his final testament to the letter. The demands were these: His estate could be bequeathed only to an American city, one that would build a museum to serve as a temple to his art and to nothing else. No works could ever be sold. No other artist could ever show a single piece alongside his. All Clyfford Still, all the time."