You can find my weekly list of New York area happenings (including Susanna Heller’s exhibit of abstractions, as seen above) right here.
Monthly Archive for March, 2011
A graffiti/street art tribute to historian and Museum of Modern Art director Alfred Barr, by Daniel Feral. See it in the old Donnell Library windows across from MoMA, as part of the exhibit Pantheon, starting this Saturday.
Shinjuku, 6:43, by Joseph O. Holmes — to benefit the Japan Society’s Earthquake Relief Fund. (Image courtesy of Holmes and 20×200.)
- Things that are brilliant: Hennessy Youngman — explaining relational aesthetics, and how to be a successful black artist.
- Even more: Youngman interviewed in Art in America — showing a keen understanding of what it means to be an art writer: “Like you as an arts writer, you gotta feel the same way, dedicating yourself to elevating the critical understanding of art, but getting paid crap and busting ass to make ends meet. Meanwhile Rachel Harrison can fart in a jar and make Scrooge McDuck scrilla.”
- From the Department of Crazy Border Politics: An essay on the Erez Crossing, by Richard Moore.
- Plastic: The diet of sea turtles. (Cool Green Science.)
- Parsing the summary judgment in the Patrick Cariou versus Richard Prince copyright case: Art Fag City, Photo District News, New York Times. But, if you really want to dig deep on this, check out this post by Greg Allen. He’s combed through all of the available legal materials, including interviews, and organized them into a book. Should come in handy during the appeal…
- Artists versus Gugg Abu Dhabi: Artists threaten boycott over working conditions at museum site. The museum fires back, saying they’ve made substantial progress in assuring workers’ rights. See the Guggenheim’s full statement here.
- This is sooooo rad: LACMA has created an image database of unrestricted works from their collection. Digital nerds, have at it!!
- Things that are ?!?!??!?!?!?!?: Maine governor wants to remove a mural from the state’s Department of Labor because it reflects labor history.
- “Jeff Koons Must Die!!!”
- From Russia with Love: The photographs of Andreas Neumann.
- How role-playing games have permeated the world of art. (@jomc.)
- From the Department of Me, Me, Me: I’m interviewed on the Dead Hare Radio Hour and talk way too much. Best to fast forward to the second half of the show, to listen to Duncan McKenzie from Bad at Sports, who is all kinds of funny.
- A Disneyland fashion spread. Not sure which piece I love more: the embroidered sweater-vest paired with the Bertha Mae steamboat or the turban with Sleeping Beauty’s castle. (Dinosaurs & Robots.)
- A fascinating piece by critic Jeet Heer on race and racism in vintage comics, in one and two parts.
- Maps that turn in on themselves.
- C-Monster Est: Ancient Graffiti in Context. This story is amazing. And I would loooove to see this book. Too bad it’s $95. For the Kindle version. NUTS. (Thank you, Robin, for the heads up.)
- Today’s Graff: Crin’s knotty tags in Berlin.
- “A mauve zone of pseudo-familiarity.” The world of airport carpets. (@nicolatwilley.)
- Fascinating piece by Justin Davidson on New York’s relationship to its waterfront.
- “We are an insatiable oasis of Gullivers in a shrinking, Lilliputian world of technology.” William Shatner explains microprocessors, circa 1976.
Alexander Chen’s musical subway map, over at Gallerina.
Undocumented Interventions_13, by Julio César Morales. Part of the solo exhibit Contrabando, at Frey Norris, in San Francisco. Opens this Saturday; reception at 4pm. (Image courtesy of Frey Norris.)
- North Adams, Mass.: Memery: Imitation, Memory, and Internet Culture at MASS MoCA, opens Sunday.
- NYC: El Celso, No Habla Español CLOSING PARTY, this Saturday at Pandemic Gallery at 7pm. Come dance with us in the chicha disco before it closes.
- NYC: Ryan Frank, R. Justin Stewart and Morgan Levy, Art & Lies, at Invisible Dog Art Center, in Brooklyn, opens Friday at 6pm.
- NYC: 2×4, with Jim Lee, Jamie Powell, Michael Scoggins and Carmen Tiffany, at the Laundromat, in Bushwick, this Saturday and Sunday.’
- NYC: Andreas Gefeller, The Japan Series, at Hasted Kraeutler, opens Thursday.
- NYC: Wash Your Face, a performance by Fluxus artist Ben Patterson, at Third Streaming in SoHo, this Friday at 6:00pm. ($10 suggested donation.)
- NYC: Unpainted Paintings, at Luxembourg & Dayan, through May 27.
- NYC: Paul Chan reads from Phaedrus Pron at 192 Books, in Chelsea, this evening at 7pm.
- NYC: Infinite Variety: Three Centuries of Red and White Quilts, at the Park Avenue Armory, through Wednesday. (Get over there. This is about to close.)
- NYC: Pantheon, a history of art from the streets, in the chashama windows at Donnell Library (across from MoMA), starting this Saturday.
- Philadelphia: Robots Will Kill, at Vincent Michael Gallery, opens Friday at 7pm.
- San Diego: Streetwise: Masters of Street Photography, at the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, through May 15.
- L.A.: David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy, at LACMA, opens Sunday.
- L.A.: Surface Truths: Abstract Paintings in the Sixties, at the Norton Museum of Art, through Aug. 15.
- L.A.: My Super Hero: New Contemporary Art from Iran, at Morono Kiang Gallery, in downtown, through April 30.
- Seattle: Matt Sellars, Supra Tidal, at Platform Gallery, opens Thursday at 6pm.
Ad Reinhardt’s list of desirable and undesirable words for describing art. Sadly, ‘ridiculosity’ did not make his list. (All images courtesy of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art and Princeton Architectural Press.)
Any regular reader of this blog will know that I am partial to lists. One, because they’re handy. Two, because they can convey great meaning in just a few words. And, three, because they can reveal so much about the person that creates them. Which is why I’ve really enjoyed thumbing through Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts and Other Artists’ Enumerations, by Liza Kirwin, who serves as curator of manuscripts at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
As part of her job, Kirwin combs through the files that she receives from artists’ estates or from the artists themselves, cataloguing important letters and diaries. Almost every single collection is accompanied, she says, by lots of lists. “Some have thousands,” she explains, from lists that chronicle artworks shown at a particular exhibit to lists that record day-to-day gallery business. Though often considered ephemera, these can often be invaluable. “One of our treasures in the archives is the list by Picasso of artists that he recommends for the 1913 Armory show.”
Her book, published last year by Princeton Architectural Press, contains a wide gamut of highly intriguing lists, by artists both well-known and forgotten. This includes Franz Kline’s liquor bill for a 1960 New Year’s Eve party. (He spent a sum total $274.51 for an extravagant quantity of booze — that’s more than $2,000 in 2011 dollars). There are Ad Reinhardt’s tidily organized lists of words on index cards, from 1951, in which he creates a schematic of art language. (Shown above, and after the jump.) And there are the lists of painter Adolf Konrad (1915-2003), who once created a pictorial packing list for a jaunt through Egypt and Rome in the ‘early ’60s (see below). “When this came in,” says Kirwin, of Konrad’s watercolor list, “I made a photocopy of it because I said to myself, ‘If I ever do a book, I want to include it in there.’ I just loved it. And now it’s the cover.”
One of the pieces Kirwin found particularly meaningful were the to-do lists of painter and collagist Janice Lowry (1946-2009. “She died of liver cancer,” says Kirwin. “She was working out a lot of issues with her family in her lists. She told me that she could look at the list and see which things she was really avoiding because she would migrate it to the next list. A lot of these had to do with going to the doctor and getting blood tests. She felt intuitively that something was wrong her.”
As technology changes, so does the nature of lists. More contemporary submissions to the archives, says Kirwin, often arrive on discs. These raise all manner of preservation questions: Do you preserve the list in its original formatting? Or strip it down to simple text? How do you store it? “It’s something we’re grappling with,” she explains. “But the lists, they’re not as much fun, for sure.”
See more sample lists below. Click on images to supersize. Want to see more? The Morgan Library in New York will display these, and many others, starting in June.
Continue reading ‘List of Lists: A book of artistic miscellany.’
Because we don’t have cable television, Celso and I often spend our evenings flipping through the variety shows, telenovelas and dubbed-over ’80s action films on one of the four Spanish-language channels our digital converter allows us access to. Needless to say, it’s a phantasmagoria of bright colors and histrionics (not to mention, dubbed-over Rob Van Dam movies). And, it probably goes without saying that the roles women are cast in are total crap. But galling sexism aside, the visuals are always worthwhile, if not bordering on surreal. Herewith, a record of some of the finer moments of our last few months of TV viewing. Buen provecho.
Continue reading ‘Photo Diary: Spanish-language TV as visual poetry.’
My New York Datebook is up over at WNYC, including gobs of space devoted to the all-kinds-of-hot German Expressionism show at MoMA (that’s a detail of a work by Egon Schiele peeking out from above).
Wieners, everywhere. (Photo by paladinsf.)
There’s been some online kerfuffling on the interwebz about the stunning lack of ladies present in Modern Art Notes March Madness-style tournament, in which he’s asking readers to vote on the “greatest work of art since World War II.” The list, which was developed by a guest panel of five curators, features a total of 64 works of art. Of these, a sum total of three are crafted by women (Cindy Sherman, Maya Lin and Marina Abramovic). Two are by artists who are non-white (Kerry James Marshall and Lin, who is in for a two-fer). Almost all of the artists represented are from the U.S. or Western Europe. Andy Warhol makes the list five times. Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns are each represented by four works. And Gerhard Richter is in for three.
I’d never be the sort to oppose a good gimmick to goose web traffic, but it did rankle me to see this list. For one, it seems to tell a very narrow of art history. I don’t necessarily have a problem with this, provided the labels are cleared up: In which case, we could re-baptize the tournament “The Best Art Work Created by a Dude Living in in London, New York or Berlin Sometime Between 1945 and 1960.” (But I suppose that doesn’t have that same ring to it.) Two, I was disappointed to see that a blogger who has taken arts institutions to task for being less than diverse, would publish a list that appeared to be the exact opposite. Three, I had to wonder if the world really needs that many Jasper Johns flags. I mean, really.
Green has defended his decisions on Twitter, stating that he wasn’t going to tell his invited curators which names to submit and that the list represents the “most-settled” artists in the 1945-60 canon. (Again, here.) To Green’s first point: I’d argue that the story a writer tells is colored by the sources he or she chooses to consult. Perhaps a more diverse group of experts would have yielded a more diverse result. To the second, I’d say: if the time-frame here is “since World War II” as originally stated (instead of 1945-60 as later implied on Twitter), then the canon ain’t even close to being settled.
Now, why could any of this possibly matter? After all, it’s just a silly game. Well, I think it matters a lot. For one, Green’s blog is an important outlet for coverage about arts institutions. This tournament will get linked to, it’ll get Facebook liked and it’ll turn up in Google searches when some student somewhere does a search for “greatest works of art since World War II.” Some little newspaper or arts journal might even run an item about it. In other words, it will become part of the record — a record for a system that already excels at excluding women and minorities from the larger narrative about art. (Something I’ve written about.) Which is why this is all such a bummer: an opportunity to provide a more comprehensive view of art, in a fun and interactive way, ends up being just the same old story.
For more: Brian Dupont has a blog post deconstructing the list. And Two Coats of Paint has a one- and two-part post that features various folks (Dupont, Jennifer Dalton, Michelle Vaughan, Hilary Robinson and many others) making some fantastic suggestions. You’ll find my list after the jump. (Although consider it more of a riff than a definitive list because it’s late and I’m TIRED.)
Continue reading ‘The Big Salchicha: Our male-dominated art industry.’
Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at JFK. Now slated to become a boutique hotel. (Photo by C-M.)
- A hack that allows you to play Katamari Damacy with any website. Duuuude. (@starwarsmodern.)
- Akira Kurosawa on earthquakes. Plus: Studio 360 has a great segment on Japan’s artistic legacy of destruction and rebirth. Worth a listen.
- The caretaker of Chernobyl’s sarcophagus. (BLDGBLOG.)
- Striking photos of the Libyan uprising by Gabriele Micalizzi.
- This Janet Malcolm piece about Sarah Palin’s TV show is pretty dang rad. Related: Palin hates the NEA.
- The neuroscience of art — and whether humans are hardwired to have an appreciation for Henry Moore. Seriously. (@mrjohnflowers.)
- Choose your favorite masterpiece from among a lengthy, unimaginative list of white guys from the U.S. and Western Europe. Two Coats of Paint responds here.
- The Good, the Bad, and the Colen: William Powhida’s guide to New York art critics. I made the list and just wanna know if there’s some sorta Kaplan program I can do to improve my “criticality” score.
- Stephen Colbert’s art-on. Co-starring Simon de Pury.
- No Grupo, a Mexican conceptual group that patented the act of appreciating the taco. All I have to say is: Yes.
- Ben Davis on the aesthetics of “bling conceptualism” and Terence Koh’s on-his-knees performance art piece at Mary Boone.
- Speaking of bling: curator Dan Cameron defends friend-of-Miuccia-Prada Francesco Vezzoli. In case you want to take a walk down memory lane: San Suzie’s coverage of Vezzoli’s ridonkulous cologne show in Rome in 2009 — a piece that is now part of the permanent collection at MoCA in L.A. Is it possible to snort-laugh and gag at the same time? (Art Fag City.)
- Jean-Michel Basquiat once smoked pot in Eli Broad’s bathroom. Plus: Broad thinks La Cicciolina is “rather unusual.” He also thinks he’s spent up to $400 million on art (more than the GDP of Tonga).
- On Lynd Ward’s 1930s woodcut comics.
- David Lynch’s hair as guide to art history. Handy. (Eyeteeth.)
- Kyle Chayka’s piece on video games and abstraction in Kill Screen makes me think Malevich shoulda made video games.
- Sorta related: Malevich as inspiration for contemporary Barcelona street art.
- Today’s Train Graff: Super cuteness by Lunar in Kosovo.
- The art of Argentinean bus and truck paintings. Love how rococo this is. (Thanks, Ries!)
- I’d be so gangsta if I had a Volkswagenball.