Monthly Archive for July, 2009

Page 4 of 4

Calendar. 07.07.09.


Untitled, 2009 by Andrew Prayzner, from a series about drug mules. (Image courtesy of Andrew Prayzner.)

Sebastian Puig: It’s summer in Paris, and the living ain’t easy.


Way better than Antony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth: the summertime crowds at the Louvre. (Photos by Sebastian Puig.)

Once upon a time, in our youth, we were asked to write for a companion guide to a famous novel by Dan Brown. We visited many locations in the book and wrote with some authority (being versed in art conservation matters) about the restoration of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper in Milan. But we wrote from a distance about the Caravaggio holdings at the Louvre.

Our challenge was to figure out which painting in the Grand Gallerie could have been yanked off the wall during a key murder scene. We went for the fabulous Death of the Virgin (and luckily, so did the movie-makers, who turned the novel into a Tom Hanks romp, complete with straightened hair). But having just been to Paris to visit said gallery in person, we think that we may have made a mistake…

Continue reading ‘Sebastian Puig: It’s summer in Paris, and the living ain’t easy.’

The Digest. 07.06.09.


Detail of Abuela, 2006, oil on cedar, by Eugenia Martínez. (Image courtesy of Eugenia Martínez.)

Inflatable rats.


Runs With Scissors.


AudreyH.


Photo by David Reeves.

It’s July.

Happy 4th.

The Digest. 07.03.09.


Hooray for the Red, White and Blue: All Supply, No Demand by Skewville in NYC. (Photo by shoehorn99.)

4:20 Video Break: Venice Biennale style.


Piotr Uklanski’s Dancing Nazis at the Palazzo Grassi, during the Venice Biennale. (Surreptitious video by San Suzie.)

Calendar. 07.02.09.


Detail from a photograph: Rehacer el Amor: Habitaciones, Hostales, Lima at the Centro Cultural de España in Lima. (Image courtesy of CCELIMA.)

Gay Swan on Squeak Carnwath at the Oakland Museum of California.


If only guilt-free zones weren’t so small: Good Luck, by Squeak Carnwath at the Oakland Museum of Art. (Photos by Gay Swan.)

Squeak Carnwath’s paintings are too big to be shoplifted. Otherwise, I would happily “own” one or two of the idiosyncratic, icon-addled, blackboard-sized canvasses from her first solo museum show at the Oakland Museum of California — at the tender age of 62. As one of the leading California artists no one’s ever heard of (unlike her cohorts Viola Frey and Jay DeFeo), Carnwath fuses the personal symbology of a genius Waldorf preschooler with the flawed humanity of the psychotherapy couch. The result is pure Californication.

I couldn’t not love her recurring guilt-free zones (Everything(2)), or her collection of good luck symbols (Good Luck ), bunnies (Long Happy Life ) and record albums (Side One ) — the latter representing about the side-oneness of life. There’s a shameless appropriation of periodic table grids (Four Months), confession (Promise) and assorted visual elements that once led people to associate her work with outsider art. Each painting reads like a short story asking universal questions. Then on the video at the end of the show, there’s Squeak with all the answers. And you walk out feeling like you just had a great talk with your therapist.

Painting Is No Ordinary Object runs through Aug 23.

Continue reading ‘Gay Swan on Squeak Carnwath at the Oakland Museum of California.’

The Digest. 07.01.09.


Dismemberment of Jeanne D’Arc by Anish Kapoor, at this past last May’s Brighton Festival. You know you want to see it large. See a photo essay of the construction of the piece here. (Photo by Luna Park.)

Congrats to Eugenio for winning the C-Mon Giveaway Extravaganza of Marc Johns’ Serious Drawings!