Instead of remembering the memories with a top ## list, I'm giving out awards:
Object I most wanted to play with: Manuel Rocha Iturbide's I Play The Drums With Frequency
I wanted to plug my ipod in and see how other sounds changed this sculpture. Disponible would have been a much more pedantic show without this sculpture.
Object I had the most fun playing with: Wendy Jacob's Ice Floe
Good clean fun, eerie, and smart. You could "look" at art without using your eyes, which is always a bonus. Was also a great place to check your phone or think about how awesome art is.
Object I loved, even if I only saw half of it: Christian Marclay's The Clock
I'm not sure how much of The Clock I saw, but it was a lot. The next time someone tells you art has to be experienced completely to be understood, be skeptical.
Nerdiest show: Drawing with Code
This show was fantastic. The Purple Blurb talk at MIT was fantastic. The artist talks at the DeCordova were fantastic. This show was solid with historically interesting work that is often disregarded for being too far outside what art "should be."
Best talk given to a bunch of captive undergrads, their professor, and myself: Katy Siegel talking about Art Since '45 at Tufts.
Seriously, the book was sensational and the talk was compelling. Why did no one show up to this? While we're at it, Art Since '45 should also be considered one of the best books of the year.
The "Live Locally, Show Globally" award: Jaap Pieters at Spectacle
This award is the anti-yokelist award. Pieters work was about the world outside his apartment's window. It reminded me of Rebecca Meyers, but more cogent and succinct. His vision of a micro-local becomes mythical, extending the confined into a elaborate, but universal archetype.
Show most reflecting a generation: The Strange LIfe of Objects, Annette Lemieux
This show was great. It's one of the exhibitions this year that I kick myself for not writing about. Using only a few works, Lelia Amalfitano and Judith Hoos Fox brought more than just Lemieux's work, they illustrated a whole generation's concerns. These objects made visible for me just how complicated art was when the international art market started to dictate artistic value. The concealed personal meaning mixed with social metaphors created/creates meaning that survives to this day.
The I wanna talk to that guy about art all day award: Matrix 162, Shaun Gladwell
Anybody who creates Pacific Undertow Sequence (Bondi) is someone I feel that I could relate to. The work is lovely and I think it expands his visual subject matter just enough to move past the hyper-masculine, Mt. Dew, X-Games style he's become known for.
Best historical document: Record > Again! 40 Years of Video Art in Germany, Part 2
I heart video art so much, and yet knew nothing about almost any of these works. You could teach an entire semester's course off of this collection or maybe finally end the myth that video art sprung fully formed from Nam June Paik's head in 1965. It didn't. It also includes a great window into what the artistic situation was in divided Germany; it was complicated and low-tech.
Best plea for donations: the MFA's contemporary wing.
They have an ambitious staff that truly care about the subject, it's time for the collections to grow. Anyone got a friend who owns some really interesting art?
Showing posts with label Museums. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Museums. Show all posts
05 January 2012
25 May 2011
False Dichotomies
So I'm always doing art shitz. It apparently means that I'm a happier dude than everyone else.
But lately, I've been visiting very diverse art events. Some might call it high or low culture or maybe some of it is stuffy or relaxed. I don't know what it is, but I think that these two types of events just have different audiences. Two photos as examples:
The top is the 4th floor of the Harvard Art museum. Wonderfully filled installation with a solid showing of art from around 1870/1880. Historically important and vital to understanding art history.
The bottom is from the final party/performances at MEME in Cambridge. A bunch of drunken fools playing kazoos and laughing as they improvise music at the behest of the conductor (the blur in the middle).
Are these the poles that people in universities use as high and low? No. They would certainly define a painting from Harvard's collection as high, sure, but they would likely use lady gaga or some advertising spread as the painting's opposite. This low-brow-as-advertising crap has been encouraged deeply by Roland Barthes (pdf). Barthes is an inescapable corner stone of art theory eduction (with Sculpture in the Expanded Field and Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction as at least two of the other corners).
Low-art is usually described as advertising partially because of Barthes' analysis of static advertising images. It becomes most clear when you consider this: if you asked the supposed commoner who decides such things, is The Hangover from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec or is MEME's improv "real art?"
My assumption is that your average person would say that T-L is real art and the improvised music is not real art.
The T-L is easier to read as art, like the advertising spread. From the content to the handling of the paint, this is a great example of how we have been taught that hand-made abstractions are the definition of art. It's also easier to "skim off" the semiotics of what the painting is trying to do. The white wall, the silence, the paying money to get in, the frame, the guards, the space around each work, the wall text announcing the provenance and the official statistics. These are as clear as the pasta advertising's attempt at reading Italian. The culture of high art museums is showing how cultured each work is through the semiotics of the presentation.
This is not evident in MEME's event. Instead the linguistic, coded and non-coded iconic messages are ambiguous. What are we being directed to think in this situation? Is this just a good party? Are nerds like me supposed to remember this event and write about it to anchor it in art history? To use Barthes' ideas for a moment, there is an arbitrariness here that is absent from a museum presentation. The frankness of the image is incomplete at MEME. The "what it is" non-coded message is just a bunch of people having fun. Is that art now?
So Barthes' brand of decoding static images is a bad method to explore what was happening at MEME that night. I think that the "message in the medium" is that performance is something that is not static and functions outside the rules of advertising. I think that low-art, low-brow, whatever you want to call it is best used to look at things like advertising, pop art, graffiti, comic books, or graphic design. Barthes' brand of semiotics is not a universally applicable tool in art.
If people want to continue arguing about the cultured qualities of The Hangover and The Hangover, let them, but if you tell me that a party atmosphere can't be art, then we are going to have to find another reason why besides it's "lowbrow."
I'm sure that someone wants to argue that it's neither: it's avant-garde. Can relaxed performance be ahead of the curve in 2011? Nope. In the 1960's, maybe. Why can't the two just have different audiences that are social equals? Why does everything in art theory have to encourage political divisions?
But lately, I've been visiting very diverse art events. Some might call it high or low culture or maybe some of it is stuffy or relaxed. I don't know what it is, but I think that these two types of events just have different audiences. Two photos as examples:
The top is the 4th floor of the Harvard Art museum. Wonderfully filled installation with a solid showing of art from around 1870/1880. Historically important and vital to understanding art history.
The bottom is from the final party/performances at MEME in Cambridge. A bunch of drunken fools playing kazoos and laughing as they improvise music at the behest of the conductor (the blur in the middle).
Are these the poles that people in universities use as high and low? No. They would certainly define a painting from Harvard's collection as high, sure, but they would likely use lady gaga or some advertising spread as the painting's opposite. This low-brow-as-advertising crap has been encouraged deeply by Roland Barthes (pdf). Barthes is an inescapable corner stone of art theory eduction (with Sculpture in the Expanded Field and Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction as at least two of the other corners).
Low-art is usually described as advertising partially because of Barthes' analysis of static advertising images. It becomes most clear when you consider this: if you asked the supposed commoner who decides such things, is The Hangover from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec or is MEME's improv "real art?"
My assumption is that your average person would say that T-L is real art and the improvised music is not real art.
The T-L is easier to read as art, like the advertising spread. From the content to the handling of the paint, this is a great example of how we have been taught that hand-made abstractions are the definition of art. It's also easier to "skim off" the semiotics of what the painting is trying to do. The white wall, the silence, the paying money to get in, the frame, the guards, the space around each work, the wall text announcing the provenance and the official statistics. These are as clear as the pasta advertising's attempt at reading Italian. The culture of high art museums is showing how cultured each work is through the semiotics of the presentation.
This is not evident in MEME's event. Instead the linguistic, coded and non-coded iconic messages are ambiguous. What are we being directed to think in this situation? Is this just a good party? Are nerds like me supposed to remember this event and write about it to anchor it in art history? To use Barthes' ideas for a moment, there is an arbitrariness here that is absent from a museum presentation. The frankness of the image is incomplete at MEME. The "what it is" non-coded message is just a bunch of people having fun. Is that art now?
So Barthes' brand of decoding static images is a bad method to explore what was happening at MEME that night. I think that the "message in the medium" is that performance is something that is not static and functions outside the rules of advertising. I think that low-art, low-brow, whatever you want to call it is best used to look at things like advertising, pop art, graffiti, comic books, or graphic design. Barthes' brand of semiotics is not a universally applicable tool in art.
If people want to continue arguing about the cultured qualities of The Hangover and The Hangover, let them, but if you tell me that a party atmosphere can't be art, then we are going to have to find another reason why besides it's "lowbrow."
I'm sure that someone wants to argue that it's neither: it's avant-garde. Can relaxed performance be ahead of the curve in 2011? Nope. In the 1960's, maybe. Why can't the two just have different audiences that are social equals? Why does everything in art theory have to encourage political divisions?
18 May 2011
Rain. Hate it.
It's Museum day e'reybody! It's also another rainy day! oh boy!
I'm about to move house, so that's fun! Went to the PEM yesterday to see Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection, which proves that a rich couple with a singular interest can bring together a collection of pretty great works. There are a few stand-outs and a bunch of filler, but it's a pretty good selection of work.
Worth the price of admission: Isaack Koedijck's Barber-Surgeon Tending a Peasant's Foot, van der Heyden's View of the Westerkerk Amsterdam, Ruisdael's View of Haarlem, Cuyp's Orpheus Charming the Animals and the one Rembrandt, a portrait of Aeltje Uylenburgh (scrabble won't accept that spelling).
The PEM's Freeport exhibitions continue to be great. #2 from Marianne Mueller is a collection/installation. The overall feeling you get is confrontation. Things from the PEM's collections are held in opposition--two objects are kept in tension over and over again. The walls are covered with very specific pantone colors. Mueller included some of her photographs in the installation too. There are three videos of women standing facing the camera. They are, again, confrontational. I do want to know why women as video subject, are they to be gazed at, or are they gazing at us, or both? It seems deliberately gendered either way.
Freeport #3 is up at currently too, Susan Philipsz has an 8 channel sound piece installed. It's her singing the same song 8 different times exposing the differences in song. It comes in and out of focus over and over again. I assume it considers the change in oral histories over time, as it's a multi-version layering of a traditional song.
The NGC And MFA Acquired Christian Marclay’s 24-Hour Video, The Clock recently. I've been thinking about it and its place in art right now. It's a hit. I don't know how long it will last, if it's an instant classic or if it's going to change over time to a dated work. One of the reasons why I think it's popular outside of hardcore contemporary art circles is that it is a collage of popular movies. It has the same connection to popular culture as the new Beastie Boys video. Not that interesting, unless you care about seeing celebrities when you don't expect them. I personally can't wait to experience the sharpening of time in it. But I'm an insomniac, so it might just feel like another day...
Installations from Ai WeiWei, Olafur Eliasson, and Tomás Saraceno were exhibited at Harvard. I think that you can experience 2/3 of it via video the same way that you would have in person. The Eliasson was more intimate and wider in scope at the same time. He put more into his work.
The cyberarts festival is done. I almost agree with Greg Cook's review, which is a rare. There was something disjointed about this year's festival. There seemed to be fewer cyber artists and more +1's who wanted the publicity. The stand outs are Jim Campbell at Howie's gallery, the German videos at Goethe Institute (my writing about that- symposium and works), and the Drawing with Code exhibition at DeCordova (review is in draft form at Printeresting.org).
Anyway, off to the Harvard Museum to make more museum memories. But before I go, if you are in Boston area, go to meme's closing this weekend, a sad/happy event.
I'm about to move house, so that's fun! Went to the PEM yesterday to see Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection, which proves that a rich couple with a singular interest can bring together a collection of pretty great works. There are a few stand-outs and a bunch of filler, but it's a pretty good selection of work.
Worth the price of admission: Isaack Koedijck's Barber-Surgeon Tending a Peasant's Foot, van der Heyden's View of the Westerkerk Amsterdam, Ruisdael's View of Haarlem, Cuyp's Orpheus Charming the Animals and the one Rembrandt, a portrait of Aeltje Uylenburgh (scrabble won't accept that spelling).
The PEM's Freeport exhibitions continue to be great. #2 from Marianne Mueller is a collection/installation. The overall feeling you get is confrontation. Things from the PEM's collections are held in opposition--two objects are kept in tension over and over again. The walls are covered with very specific pantone colors. Mueller included some of her photographs in the installation too. There are three videos of women standing facing the camera. They are, again, confrontational. I do want to know why women as video subject, are they to be gazed at, or are they gazing at us, or both? It seems deliberately gendered either way.
Freeport #3 is up at currently too, Susan Philipsz has an 8 channel sound piece installed. It's her singing the same song 8 different times exposing the differences in song. It comes in and out of focus over and over again. I assume it considers the change in oral histories over time, as it's a multi-version layering of a traditional song.
The NGC And MFA Acquired Christian Marclay’s 24-Hour Video, The Clock recently. I've been thinking about it and its place in art right now. It's a hit. I don't know how long it will last, if it's an instant classic or if it's going to change over time to a dated work. One of the reasons why I think it's popular outside of hardcore contemporary art circles is that it is a collage of popular movies. It has the same connection to popular culture as the new Beastie Boys video. Not that interesting, unless you care about seeing celebrities when you don't expect them. I personally can't wait to experience the sharpening of time in it. But I'm an insomniac, so it might just feel like another day...
Installations from Ai WeiWei, Olafur Eliasson, and Tomás Saraceno were exhibited at Harvard. I think that you can experience 2/3 of it via video the same way that you would have in person. The Eliasson was more intimate and wider in scope at the same time. He put more into his work.
The cyberarts festival is done. I almost agree with Greg Cook's review, which is a rare. There was something disjointed about this year's festival. There seemed to be fewer cyber artists and more +1's who wanted the publicity. The stand outs are Jim Campbell at Howie's gallery, the German videos at Goethe Institute (my writing about that- symposium and works), and the Drawing with Code exhibition at DeCordova (review is in draft form at Printeresting.org).
Anyway, off to the Harvard Museum to make more museum memories. But before I go, if you are in Boston area, go to meme's closing this weekend, a sad/happy event.
03 April 2011
Another gap
More accounting for myself after a long absence. I do have plans to get back to blogging soon, so if you are paying attention, now is the time.
Since my last mea culpa post, I finished traveling too much (Oct-2nd week of Jan, I was home about 1 week a month), wrote quite a few reviews for the Daily Serving, wrote a review for artsfuse about the new Americas wing, applied and was rejected from CMS at MIT, became a contributor for Art Writ and printeresting, and finalized/installed/feted my show at the BCA.
I plan on laying out a curator's thingy for that show soon-- including pictures etc. Briefly, knowing that I am biased, I love this show and I love all the artists in it. It seems to have been beneficial to the space, artists, and me, so I think we all win.
I'm writing some thoughts on internet nerdery, social media in the arts. I will likely post something about that soon.
Things you should see if you are near Boston-
Drawing with Code and Rachel Perry Welty at DeCordova
Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection at the PEM and Mirror of Holland: Drawings from the George and Maida Abrams Collection at the MFA.
All of the upcoming ICA exhibitions including the AR works (that the ICA approved, but doesn't seem to know how to advertise for or have even mentioned yet) during the Cyber Arts Festival.
Nathalie Miebach at Fuller Craft
If you are in NY, go see the amazing Lucy Lippard talk about Ghosts, the Daily News, and Prophecy: Critical Landscape Photography Thursday, April 7, 2011, 7 pm. She's the smartest art nerd I know and is we should all wish to be half as smart as her.
Feel free to ignore my dear friend the Museum Nerd who didn't like Mark Morisoe at the Artists Space. I wanted to see this show as it is an important part of the Boston School that the ICA cemented as a thing. (Also go to the Shellburne Thurber show at Bab's Gallery)
If you are in NJ, Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage at Princeton should be worth your attention.
In bad news, 57 Delle is closed, MEME is closing (but has a great schedule over the next few months), Walker Contemporary/Anthony Greaney/Carroll and Sons are all moving. We have so few contemporary spaces, this is a big deal to me. Boston seems to always seems to be on the edge of slipping into a dark ages, now is no different.
Since my last mea culpa post, I finished traveling too much (Oct-2nd week of Jan, I was home about 1 week a month), wrote quite a few reviews for the Daily Serving, wrote a review for artsfuse about the new Americas wing, applied and was rejected from CMS at MIT, became a contributor for Art Writ and printeresting, and finalized/installed/feted my show at the BCA.
I plan on laying out a curator's thingy for that show soon-- including pictures etc. Briefly, knowing that I am biased, I love this show and I love all the artists in it. It seems to have been beneficial to the space, artists, and me, so I think we all win.
I'm writing some thoughts on internet nerdery, social media in the arts. I will likely post something about that soon.
Things you should see if you are near Boston-
Drawing with Code and Rachel Perry Welty at DeCordova
Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection at the PEM and Mirror of Holland: Drawings from the George and Maida Abrams Collection at the MFA.
All of the upcoming ICA exhibitions including the AR works (that the ICA approved, but doesn't seem to know how to advertise for or have even mentioned yet) during the Cyber Arts Festival.
Nathalie Miebach at Fuller Craft
If you are in NY, go see the amazing Lucy Lippard talk about Ghosts, the Daily News, and Prophecy: Critical Landscape Photography Thursday, April 7, 2011, 7 pm. She's the smartest art nerd I know and is we should all wish to be half as smart as her.
Feel free to ignore my dear friend the Museum Nerd who didn't like Mark Morisoe at the Artists Space. I wanted to see this show as it is an important part of the Boston School that the ICA cemented as a thing. (Also go to the Shellburne Thurber show at Bab's Gallery)
If you are in NJ, Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage at Princeton should be worth your attention.
In bad news, 57 Delle is closed, MEME is closing (but has a great schedule over the next few months), Walker Contemporary/Anthony Greaney/Carroll and Sons are all moving. We have so few contemporary spaces, this is a big deal to me. Boston seems to always seems to be on the edge of slipping into a dark ages, now is no different.
03 November 2010
Where I've been
Minneapolis, Philly, New York, Chicago, Princeton NJ, Southern Maine, and a few other spots along the way. I've been on a crazy travel schedule. It's been great.
I started writing for DailyServing and started a blog for print nerdery (the Wandering Printmaker). It's been crazy, and tomorrow I'm headed back to NY for Print Week.
Some recent ideas in no particular order:
- NEJAR, and Greg Cook can bite my left ankle. The worst public art thing is redic. It's insulting to the artists and myopic.
- Minneapolis Institute of Art is one of the best museums I've ever been to. With a good olde-fashioned dictator and a few hundred more years, it would be Louvre or Prado good.
- Writing about the arts is hard, but I love it.
- Seeing art is awesome, and I love it.
- Sarah Sze is a good artist.
- College art museums are the entrepreneurs of the art world. Some of their ideas are great, some suck-- all are pushing new ideas though. Their work makes big museums look better than they are.
- Independent curators are the risk takers that drive the college museums entrepreneurial spirit. Thank god the AAMC finally allows them to be members.
- I like this.
- I like Pipilotti Rist a lot.
- I need to go drinking with Natalie Jeremijenko and say smart and funny things to impress her.
- AICA/USA is the secret decoder ring I want. They are the art mafia illuminati that I want to be part of.
I'll be in Chelsea and at the E/AB fair tomorrow, the IFPDA fair, the Met, Prints Gone Wild, NYU, and maybe Brooklyn Museum over the next few days. My show at BCA is right around the corner in March/April 2011. I'm still applying to MIT. I'm absolutely ready for a nap.
I started writing for DailyServing and started a blog for print nerdery (the Wandering Printmaker). It's been crazy, and tomorrow I'm headed back to NY for Print Week.
Some recent ideas in no particular order:
- NEJAR, and Greg Cook can bite my left ankle. The worst public art thing is redic. It's insulting to the artists and myopic.
- Minneapolis Institute of Art is one of the best museums I've ever been to. With a good olde-fashioned dictator and a few hundred more years, it would be Louvre or Prado good.
- Writing about the arts is hard, but I love it.
- Seeing art is awesome, and I love it.
- Sarah Sze is a good artist.
- College art museums are the entrepreneurs of the art world. Some of their ideas are great, some suck-- all are pushing new ideas though. Their work makes big museums look better than they are.
- Independent curators are the risk takers that drive the college museums entrepreneurial spirit. Thank god the AAMC finally allows them to be members.
- I like this.
- I like Pipilotti Rist a lot.
- I need to go drinking with Natalie Jeremijenko and say smart and funny things to impress her.
- AICA/USA is the secret decoder ring I want. They are the art mafia illuminati that I want to be part of.
I'll be in Chelsea and at the E/AB fair tomorrow, the IFPDA fair, the Met, Prints Gone Wild, NYU, and maybe Brooklyn Museum over the next few days. My show at BCA is right around the corner in March/April 2011. I'm still applying to MIT. I'm absolutely ready for a nap.
16 August 2010
B/R/S 135, the final episode
That's the end of Big Red and Shiny. Issue 135 is the end. Love it or hate it, it was a great place to publish reviews without major pressure. I'll miss it. My review of Rivane Neuenschwander is in 135. I'm smitten with that show weeks after seeing it, which is better than most shows I see. Hope everyone gets to see it.
Saw Anna Hepler and the Wadsworth's traveling show of American moderns on paper (also reviewed in B/R/S 135) up in Portland ME. The Portland Museum of Art is such a badly designed space, but everything they have up is wonderful and important, so you overlook the cramped spaces and narrow hallways-as-gallery. They have a nice Vuillard nude and a hybrid book painting from Anselm Kiefer that should be seen. Unfortunately I went on a day when the commercial galleries were closed, so I missed a few other things I wanted to see.
The print/drawing/paper New Works show is up at the MFA. Man did that department get the short straw in the new MFA redesign. They use to have what's now the Torf Gallery and the space next to the musical instruments. Today, they have 30% of the space in the Brown gallery. Either way, the show has some great work in it. 6 Christiane Baumgartner prints, a 95 Jasper Johns print, Julie Mehretu, and Michael Oatman’s collage Exurbia. A nice group for such a small room.
I think the best part of being in the MFA right now is the random crap you see due to the redesign. Upstairs in what will be the contemporary wing is Kara Walker, plastic wrapped Jonathan Borofsky, and a ton of plywood.
It's quite fetching.
Saw Anna Hepler and the Wadsworth's traveling show of American moderns on paper (also reviewed in B/R/S 135) up in Portland ME. The Portland Museum of Art is such a badly designed space, but everything they have up is wonderful and important, so you overlook the cramped spaces and narrow hallways-as-gallery. They have a nice Vuillard nude and a hybrid book painting from Anselm Kiefer that should be seen. Unfortunately I went on a day when the commercial galleries were closed, so I missed a few other things I wanted to see.
The print/drawing/paper New Works show is up at the MFA. Man did that department get the short straw in the new MFA redesign. They use to have what's now the Torf Gallery and the space next to the musical instruments. Today, they have 30% of the space in the Brown gallery. Either way, the show has some great work in it. 6 Christiane Baumgartner prints, a 95 Jasper Johns print, Julie Mehretu, and Michael Oatman’s collage Exurbia. A nice group for such a small room.
I think the best part of being in the MFA right now is the random crap you see due to the redesign. Upstairs in what will be the contemporary wing is Kara Walker, plastic wrapped Jonathan Borofsky, and a ton of plywood.
It's quite fetching.
19 July 2010
Another 10 hours of my life on Rt. 84
New York. Lots of art spaces to root around in. Visited again this week.
New museum's Brion Gysin show was excellent and I ran into a friend from undergrad that I haven't seen in years. This show was a disappointment for me in some ways, and completely what I wanted in others. The good news first, much of his important work from his career is shown here. The bad news, it is way too crowded for the amount of work and is a pared down show compared to the retrospective shown in the town he spent his childhood, Edmonton Canada, in 1998. If you want to learn a ton about his life and career, buy the book from Edmonton, and go to this show to see the works in person if you can get to NY at all. It's well worth it.
The reason I have to complain about the way the work was put up is that a lot of his work is very loud and chaotic. If it overlaps, you can not escape the other stuff happening in the other room. His work was mostly composed in solitude, and is very hard to find in private or public collections. This is truly an important show to see if you are interested in the artists who had no interest in Greenberg, minimalism, conceptualism, etc. He was an outsider of sorts. His work presaged a whole other way of working that was related to anything in the mainstream of art history in the 50/60/70's.
The surprise in store for me at the New Museum was Rivane Neuenschwander. She may not be an household name, but I think her work deserves this mid-career retrospective. Her work is massively influential in her native country, Brazil, and is better known in Europe. I appreciate the ephemeral nature of her work and how smart the work shown is. She creates new and accessible objects, or installations, but their immediacy, their lack of large historic critical myths is what makes me love them. It is refreshing after seeing so much conceptually driven work in Boston.
After the Storm (scroll down most the way) is one of the new works on display. The newer works do not show the influence of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, her metaphorical Brazilian artistic parents. Instead of being an experience, a video of an experimental moment, or an installation, it is a collection of 12 maps of NY's counties that have been left out in the rain to decompose. Then they are drawn and painted on. It's an object, but still requires you to pay attention to the ephemeral and non-restraint involved in the making of the work. The maps have all but been eliminated by the artist losing authority (author-ness) in the beginning stages of the creation process.
I moved on to Chelsea. Saw a pile of galleries with just one piece in it worth talking about, so I'll skip them.
The Graffiti NYC: Artists of the Third Rail was stuck in one generation of graffiti. They were nice enough to let me charge my phone and the DJ was excellent, but it wasn't the historical show about the growth of writing in NY that I hoped it was. It is always worth seeing that era. I hope it doesn't get forgotten in this mass-market driven hip hop light world we live in now. These guys lived it. Well worth seeing the paintings and the photographs of early hip hop pioneers.
Kaleidoscopic Adventures at Blank Space was cool. I was too tired by the time I got to see Rackstraw Downes at Betty Cuningham to appreciate the work, but I'll see his show at Portland Museum next year.
The Hans Op de Beeck show at Marianne Boesky was interesting. I'm not sure what to think about these large watercolors. They might be greeting cards done large, or they might be just fantastic oversized explorations of single themes like absence and presence or the often explored memory. But I like them and they stayed with me for days now.
The real reason I went down was to see the IPCNY summer show. My friend Deborah Chaney (printer at Gowanus) was a juror and wrote the essay for the show. The gallery was a milllllion degrees and louder than anything should be without amplifiers. But, the show is excellent. Heat is such a nebulous idea to jury, but hey, I didn't have to make those calls!
New museum's Brion Gysin show was excellent and I ran into a friend from undergrad that I haven't seen in years. This show was a disappointment for me in some ways, and completely what I wanted in others. The good news first, much of his important work from his career is shown here. The bad news, it is way too crowded for the amount of work and is a pared down show compared to the retrospective shown in the town he spent his childhood, Edmonton Canada, in 1998. If you want to learn a ton about his life and career, buy the book from Edmonton, and go to this show to see the works in person if you can get to NY at all. It's well worth it.
The reason I have to complain about the way the work was put up is that a lot of his work is very loud and chaotic. If it overlaps, you can not escape the other stuff happening in the other room. His work was mostly composed in solitude, and is very hard to find in private or public collections. This is truly an important show to see if you are interested in the artists who had no interest in Greenberg, minimalism, conceptualism, etc. He was an outsider of sorts. His work presaged a whole other way of working that was related to anything in the mainstream of art history in the 50/60/70's.
The surprise in store for me at the New Museum was Rivane Neuenschwander. She may not be an household name, but I think her work deserves this mid-career retrospective. Her work is massively influential in her native country, Brazil, and is better known in Europe. I appreciate the ephemeral nature of her work and how smart the work shown is. She creates new and accessible objects, or installations, but their immediacy, their lack of large historic critical myths is what makes me love them. It is refreshing after seeing so much conceptually driven work in Boston.
After the Storm (scroll down most the way) is one of the new works on display. The newer works do not show the influence of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, her metaphorical Brazilian artistic parents. Instead of being an experience, a video of an experimental moment, or an installation, it is a collection of 12 maps of NY's counties that have been left out in the rain to decompose. Then they are drawn and painted on. It's an object, but still requires you to pay attention to the ephemeral and non-restraint involved in the making of the work. The maps have all but been eliminated by the artist losing authority (author-ness) in the beginning stages of the creation process.
I moved on to Chelsea. Saw a pile of galleries with just one piece in it worth talking about, so I'll skip them.
The Graffiti NYC: Artists of the Third Rail was stuck in one generation of graffiti. They were nice enough to let me charge my phone and the DJ was excellent, but it wasn't the historical show about the growth of writing in NY that I hoped it was. It is always worth seeing that era. I hope it doesn't get forgotten in this mass-market driven hip hop light world we live in now. These guys lived it. Well worth seeing the paintings and the photographs of early hip hop pioneers.
Kaleidoscopic Adventures at Blank Space was cool. I was too tired by the time I got to see Rackstraw Downes at Betty Cuningham to appreciate the work, but I'll see his show at Portland Museum next year.
The Hans Op de Beeck show at Marianne Boesky was interesting. I'm not sure what to think about these large watercolors. They might be greeting cards done large, or they might be just fantastic oversized explorations of single themes like absence and presence or the often explored memory. But I like them and they stayed with me for days now.
The real reason I went down was to see the IPCNY summer show. My friend Deborah Chaney (printer at Gowanus) was a juror and wrote the essay for the show. The gallery was a milllllion degrees and louder than anything should be without amplifiers. But, the show is excellent. Heat is such a nebulous idea to jury, but hey, I didn't have to make those calls!
09 July 2010
Hartford/New Britain
Ran down to CT in the heat yesterday.
Visited Trinity on Main in New Britain. Gonna be putting up a show this coming spring hopefully. Might be sooner. Going to help with a show at the Mayor's gallery in New Britain this summer too.
Went to NBMAA after that. Great space. They are doing it right. Elana Herzog's works made of paper and fabric stapled to the wall were nice, but many of their paintings were what really got me excited. Tom Yost's Painter Hill Road is an excellent little landscape. Christopher Gallego's Interior with Three Rooms is another excellent realistic painting. It's exactly what it sounds like, a painting of a house's interior. Walton Ford's Fallen Mias (see above) is another stunner.
Headed up to the Wads-Ath to at least see the Matrix 159 show of Justin Lowe.
Can't say enough about this installation. He really used his chance in a museum to its full potential. The image above is from my cell phone, so it's hard to see, but this is the acid room, the 60's acid room if you ask me. The floor is a carpet of pulp horror novels, the walls are reflective, the windows are colored green and pinkish, the tv shows overlain with other acid movies, the paintings are composed from the novels in the floor. It's intense.
Next to that is a hallway that has a slide projector. This room did nothing for me, but that's ok, as it leads to the post acid, punk rock cocaine and beer CBGB's bathroom. It's a dark place and dangerous. Maybe the hallway was the aftermath of the free love era where one moves to northern Cali to grow your own food or Aspen to be free. Either way, the bathroom is what everyone seems to be talking about. It was too clean and smelled too good to be the real CBGB, but that's fine by me.
Next door to that is the 90's rave chill out room. The music Brooklyn hipsterish-- a mellow non-genre slog of noisy chillout. With the symmetrical video projector showing another set of videos mashed together, this felt overpoweringly content. Too content. Melting into the carpet content.
Hiding behind all this drug reference is a great site specificity. He reflected the museum by being era conscious and making period rooms, he brought a Jackson Pollock into CBGB's bathroom for example. He made lots of puns about what he included in each room that reflect on the Atheneum's holdings. Very smart show.
Glad I went. Any museum that has a strong contemporary tradition and a Rembrandt, Zurbaran, and a pair of Glotzious's (or is it Glotziouseses?) paintings is alright by me.
29 June 2010
How one might read modern art.
Everyone who might be slightly interested in Museums and/or art exhibitions has to watch the first 5ish minutes of this talk. Lowry is laying out a seriously important changes that are going on at the MoMA. Ann Temkin spoke at Harvard last month, and echoed these sentiments from her perspective as chief curator.
I've been reading the early history of the MoMA written for the 10th anniversary. I'm going to start writing about these years, but Lowry and Temkin both certainly know their history from what I've read already.
If you make it to 24 minutes in to Lowry's video you hear him talk about a subject I watched butchered at teh Fast Co. Wicked Pissah Bahston crap this morning. A portion of the conversation went as such: How does a Museum reach younger adults?
A: Their kids.
And kids coming off their school buses are the M-F daytime shift of art goers was what else I found out today! Man, I thought it was shifting your programing and understanding what non-AARP visitors need/want. So, if you know anyone at the MFA, let them hear that the MoMA dropped their average age from 55 to 40 years old by working with a younger audience that PS1 understood, not by forcing 30 somethings to bring their kids.
And speaking of twisting mom's arms, I guess I had more info about this than the speakers this morning, as I read this. Moms and kids are a complicated creature to court.
P.S. I just reread my Dürer review. I needed one more edit. I apologize.
I've been reading the early history of the MoMA written for the 10th anniversary. I'm going to start writing about these years, but Lowry and Temkin both certainly know their history from what I've read already.
If you make it to 24 minutes in to Lowry's video you hear him talk about a subject I watched butchered at teh Fast Co. Wicked Pissah Bahston crap this morning. A portion of the conversation went as such: How does a Museum reach younger adults?
A: Their kids.
And kids coming off their school buses are the M-F daytime shift of art goers was what else I found out today! Man, I thought it was shifting your programing and understanding what non-AARP visitors need/want. So, if you know anyone at the MFA, let them hear that the MoMA dropped their average age from 55 to 40 years old by working with a younger audience that PS1 understood, not by forcing 30 somethings to bring their kids.
And speaking of twisting mom's arms, I guess I had more info about this than the speakers this morning, as I read this. Moms and kids are a complicated creature to court.
P.S. I just reread my Dürer review. I needed one more edit. I apologize.
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