tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88760042024-03-12T21:58:01.477-04:00Art CommentsContemporary Art Blog.Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.comBlogger422125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-49866429433386332822021-02-13T19:26:00.006-05:002021-02-13T19:31:09.353-05:00New Work by Elizabeth Peyton in New York<p>Fascinating work, please enjoy!</p><p>Lara</p><p>New Work by Elizabeth Peyton</p><p>November 20, 2020 – February 20, 2021</p><p>Gladstone 64</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-b0aB0FPHq8s/YChvRZQpvzI/AAAAAAABlSU/MLgRSh3ruPsx7Qs4OLdVGhZZC5SmGPvWwCLcBGAsYHQ/s800/35CDAD79-950E-4BC6-8960-9F67E3F66646.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-b0aB0FPHq8s/YChvRZQpvzI/AAAAAAABlSU/MLgRSh3ruPsx7Qs4OLdVGhZZC5SmGPvWwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/35CDAD79-950E-4BC6-8960-9F67E3F66646.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p>#contemporaryart #art #portraiture #portraits #uesnyc #ElizabethPeyton @GladstoneNYC</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dyySedsi7KIk2qIpbgouO8JGrmNpuU3_hn7wR4_B-CS7nrAWb8i9YrEbXX-a1BDFGlT-03FxhbdfDc' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-25559515905978303032019-12-02T07:39:00.000-05:002020-02-06T19:45:17.651-05:00The Week Ahead in Art Events<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">AC WEEK AHEAD</span></div>
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<i>Dec 2 – Dec 7, 2019</i></div>
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Delighted to release the AC Week Ahead series on this platform! Curated selection of international contemporary art events that we recommend, culled from our extensive database and global network.</div>
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Of note, if you’re in South Beach Miami this week for <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach" style="-webkit-user-select: auto; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; text-decoration-skip: objects; text-decoration: none;">Art Basel Miami</a> we have you covered with the <span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">AC Bookmark 5</span> selection nestled in the list below, 5 noteworthy booths you should definitely visit while in South Beach Miami.</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">Keith Haring / Jean-Michel Basquiat:</span> Crossing Lines, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, December 1, 2019 – April 13, 2020</div>
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"A Green Thought in a Green Shade," Artists <span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">Chris Bogia, Esteben Cabeza, Heidi Howard</span> and <span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">Stephen Wuensch</span> in conversation at ATOA 12 West 12th Street, NY, Monday December 2nd 6pm-7:30pm</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">Bookmark 5</span> at Art Basel Miami Week: Essex Street gallery @AB BOOTH H9 – <b>Neïl Beloufa</b>, The Moral of the Story, Nova Sector, Booth N22 – Casey Kaplan and <b>Matthew Brannon </b>MBCC | C27, Selenas Mountain @Nada Booth P18, Larrie – <b>Sean-Kierre Lyons & Alicia Mersy </b>@Nada Booth P09</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">Naeem Mohaiemen</span> | A Missing Can of Film at ACT/MIT bartos, Wiesner Building e15-070, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, Monday, Dec. 2 – 6pm</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">Danica Barboza, Jason Hirata, Yuki Kimura, </span>and Duane Linklater opens at Artists Space, 11 Cortlandt Alley, NY, Friday, December 6th, 6–8pm<br />
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-91256959359502572032019-12-02T04:01:00.002-05:002019-12-02T04:20:30.500-05:00Tragic Death of an American Mall<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit;">“Mallrat to Snapchat: The End of the Third Place,”</span></span></h4>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Front Room gallery in New York</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 1rem;">November 29th – January 12th, New York, NY</span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i> </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>written by Peter Duhon in New York</i></span></div>
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New York based photographer Phillip Beuhler’s second solo exhibition at Front Room Gallery in New York’s Lower Eastside in Manhattan titled “Mallrat to Snapchat: The End of the Third Place,”. These photographs document the abandoned and dilapidated Wayne Hills Mall in Wayne, New Jersey. One immediately considers the recent Amazon and Jeff Bezos impact on the retail brick and mortar sector but these photographs also portend to a global crisis as the decline and rot of the American Mall was initiated before the ascent of the Amazonian model.</div>
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Much of the instability and protests in the world, as seen in Iraq, Chile, Paris and Lebanon, to name a few, have been initiated by the failed promises and fervor of pro-neoliberal politicians and aloof academics whose policies and ideologies have disproportionately looted the middle class. Interestingly enough, the failure and inability of corporations to adapt to change is on full display. Sam Goody as exhibit A.</div>
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One could argue that there’s a correlation between this work and the new mega mall projects, Hudson Yards in Manhattan and the not as yet christened New Jersey 5 billion dollar mall/entertainment complex. However, there exists a monumental difference between the American mall of yesteryear with the aims and objectives which were situated in supplying shopping fodder for an ever expanding middle class and baby boomer generation versus the Hudson Yards mall of today which was designed and built to serve an elite class which has seen enormous growth since the 80s.</div>
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This difference and distance in objectives between yesteryear‘s failed spaghetti bowl social mall experiments of everyone getting along and mixing and matching all for the betterment of society at the local mall, and today’s court jester projects designed as a playground for the ultra elite and not the local teenager trying to score his first romantic encounter at a labyrinth mall are stark and brutal.</div>
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The vinyl albums and music spinning from the turntable favors a balanced experience in this exhibition for the viewer, dissipating the pessimism displayed on the white walls with a touch of euphoric nostalgia driven by backdrop 80s music.</div>
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Beuhler commenced documenting architectural decay back in 1973 under the term “modern ruins,” a neologism he pioneered. He is also well known for his photographs published in “Woody Guthrie’s Wardy Forty,” having won a number of accolades for documenting the singer/songwriter/activist’s life at Greystone Park Psychiatric.</div>
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The exhibition in this intimate gallery is definitely worth a visit as it resuscitates and energizes a topic that at times may be hidden from view.</div>
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Photos of exhibition and trailer courtesy of @artcomments</h6>
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#art #photography #culture #creativity</div>
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-76519469143181234082015-09-06T19:47:00.001-04:002020-02-06T20:19:48.201-05:00Art Comments Interview with James Fuentes<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s3"><i>written and edited by Jeff Grunthaner and Peter Duhon in New York</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s3">If </span><span class="s3">the sense of beauty </span><span class="s3">has anythin</span><span class="s3">g to offer</span><span class="s3"> us</span><span class="s3">, then we have to bracket the kind of moralism that reduces pleasure to utility, considering instead the </span><span class="s3">utopian </span><span class="s3">potentials </span><span class="s3">delineated by</span><span class="s3"> works of art </span><span class="s3">as intimations of new societal relations</span><span class="s3">. </span><span class="s3">It’s </span><span class="s3">both </span><span class="s3">par</span><span class="s3">adoxical and frustrating </span><span class="s3">that m</span><span class="s3">ost galleries are shell</span><span class="s3">s. </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s3">Your typical art-intoxicated night out resembles nothing less than ghostling swarm</span><span class="s3">s</span><span class="s3"> of embryos darting in and out of galleries,</span><span class="s3"> as though to </span><span class="s3">incarnate themselves</span><span class="s3"> </span><span class="s3">by inhabiting </span><span class="s3">some</span><span class="s3">momentary</span><span class="s3"> carapace</span><span class="s3">, </span><span class="s3">be</span><span class="s3">com</span><span class="s3">ing </span><span class="s3">a</span><span class="s3"> kind</span><span class="s3"> of hybrid species </span><span class="s3">physically</span><span class="s3"> bra</span><span class="s3">nded by the </span><span class="s3">sites they’ve visited</span><span class="s3">. </span><span class="s3">Economics </span><span class="s3">play a heavy</span><span class="s3"> </span><span class="s3">hand </span><span class="s3">in this. </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s3">Whatever </span><span class="s3">aspirations artists and curators come to NY</span><span class="s3"> with,</span><span class="s3"> they inevitably get </span><span class="s3">caught </span><span class="s3">on the pneumatic grid of money, w</span><span class="s3">hich </span><span class="s3">c</span><span class="s3">onfines their ambition</span><span class="s3">s</span><span class="s3"> like an ether, </span><span class="s3">inverting</span><span class="s3"> their intere</span><span class="s3">st in art into to that form of</span><span class="s3"> interest rese</span><span class="s3">rved for </span><span class="s3">fiscal</span><span class="s3"> concerns</span><span class="s3">. </span><span class="s3">But if</span><span class="s3"> </span><span class="s3">works of art</span><span class="s3"> are</span><span class="s3"> </span><span class="s3">externalization</span><span class="s3">s</span><span class="s3"> of desire, dominated by the pleasure principle</span><span class="s3">, </span><span class="s3">there</span><span class="s3"> should be </span><span class="s3">a way to </span><span class="s3">use </span><span class="s3">what’s best in the aesthetic experience (fun) to create a corresponding </span><span class="s3">threshold</span><span class="s3"> </span><span class="s3">that allows</span><span class="s3"> art </span><span class="s3">to </span><span class="s3">thrive in a</span><span class="s3">n </span><span class="s3">atmosphere conform</span><span class="s3">able</span><span class="s3"> to the most receptive experience possible.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s3">I think James Fuente’</span><span class="s3">s gallery is accomplishing this, however asymptotically. </span><span class="s3">Fuentes’s gallery is superfluid. It’s not so much the quality of the works that exhibit there, as the variations that obtain from show to show which interest me the most. I’ve seen shows composed of gutted walls </span><span class="s3">of</span><span class="s3"> exposed </span><span class="s3">electrical </span><span class="s3">wiring, </span><span class="s3">video pieces that focused on the</span><span class="s3"> healing </span><span class="s3">powers of </span><span class="s3">the abject, and </span><span class="s3">a </span><span class="s3">gro</span><span class="s3">up show</span><span class="s3"> that felt weirdly </span><span class="s3">compelling</span><span class="s3"> despite the sprawling dissimil</span><span class="s3">arity of the art objects on exhibit</span><span class="s3">. </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s3">A vaguely assuming exterior of green brick opens onto a </span><span class="s3">long</span><span class="s3"> </span><span class="s3">hallway, which</span><span class="s3"> to your right</span><span class="s3"> gives way to the large mai</span><span class="s3">n gallery</span><span class="s3">. There’s a back room, also, which for the moment functions as a public viewing space (Fuentes often has two shows exhibiting simultaneously), but which will by and by be reserved for private viewings only.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">There are no windows in the gallery, which permits the construction of light to become characteristic of the works on display. The walls are white; but one can imagine them painted black or green or any other color, as though to foster a more variegated sense of the architecture itself. I feel there’s a relational quality born from all this, from the space itself: a myriad substance that can be predicated in a multitude of different ways. </span></div>
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<span class="s3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">There’s the sensation that accompanies you as you’re leaving Fuentes’s space, which is less like entering into another world than into the geographic specificity of the LES itself. The way the space manages to capture a kind of regionalism in its exhibitions of art objects and performances, while not condescending to a DIY or historicized aesthetic, is genuinely contemporary. I think it’s this sense of the genuine that I’m trying to describe here. Isn’t this what art is designed to achieve?</span></div>
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<span class="s3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><b>How do you conceive of your programming in relation to the environing neighborhood?</b></span></div>
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<span class="s3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The gallery program is very much its own organism. However, a characteristic of what we try to do is hold a mirror to what’s immediately outside of the gallery, and this can tap into a current or historic narrative. This is an effort to situate the physical gallery in its immediate geography and be mindful of its location, street, neighborhood, and community. </span></div>
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<span class="s6" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><b>Is there any way the structure of your gallery reflects its organization? For example, are different people allotted different areas to work in?</b></span></div>
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<span class="s3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">There are only three full time staff members right now so we all work together on everything.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s3"></span><b><span class="s6">Describe the transformation that has undergone in your space over the past two years. What motivated this? Do you think your current space gives artists exhibi</span><span class="s6">tion opportunities they might lack elsewhere?</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s3">We were on Delancey Street for five years, in a space that we were starting to outgrow. The space next door became available, so we recently expanded into there. We underwent a gut renovation so have a brand new facility, so to speak. Stephanie Goto was the architect. The expanded gallery offers much more to the artists. For the first year in our new space we have intermittently been programming our viewing room and calling that zone Allen & Eldridge. It was </span><span class="s3">important for me to be able to introduce new artists and points of view to the gallery in the first year, and this was a good way to do that.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><b>As a curator, what is the ideal exhibition you would personally aspire to?</b></span></div>
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<span class="s3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Aspirations in that regard change all the time.</span></div>
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<span class="s3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><b>At what moment, or during what incident or exhibition, did you notice that you were starting to outgrow the former space?</b></span></div>
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<span class="s3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">What prompted my expansion was not outgrowing the old space so much as realizing that I needed to take action on an opportunity that presented itself when the space next door to the gallery became available, the location and space really suited us as it was and the idea of more than doubling the space without having to move was exciting.</span></div>
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<span class="s3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><b>In your opinion, how does art relate to life? Do you think the walls of a gallery prevent art from entering into daily life?</b></span></div>
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<span class="s3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Ultimately, the walls of the gallery give us a good barrier to push against or operate within to aspire to make compelling exhibitions/environments. We now all have access to seeing art in daily life. I am not saying it’s the same thing, but I no doubt see more artworks on Instagram than in galleries. I think that invisible barrier between art and everyday life—let's face it, that "barrier" is education—continues to erode the more information is accessible through these means. Galleries are free and open to everyone. In fact, we should probably put a sign up out front and see if that welcomes more people to come in!</span></div>
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<span class="s3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><i><span class="s3">The next solo exhibition at James Fuentes LLC will feature work by J</span></i></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue light" , , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><i>ohn Mcallister</i>.</span><i style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><span class="s3"> It opens on November 13</span><span class="s4" style="vertical-align: super;">th</span><span class="s3">. </span></i></div>
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-68146706112126243522015-09-02T18:55:00.003-04:002015-09-02T18:58:47.044-04:00Interview with AudioVisualVenue<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Interview by <span class="il" style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">Benton</span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;"> C Bainbridge in New York</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">AudioVisualVenue (AVV) is a collective of Chinese media artists who jointly exhibit their work. AVV's goal is to redefine relationships between audiences and content within traditional theater and gallery environments. AudioVisualVenue presented the work of artists Song Yunling (Tracy), Cao Yuxi (James) and Raven Kwok from July 29 to August 6, 2015, at Made in NY Media Center's theater and Digital Media Arts Gallery in DUMBO, Brooklyn. </span><span class="il" style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">Benton</span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">C Bainbridge interviewed the artists about their work.</span></div>
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BCB: Please introduce yourselves.</div>
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RK: I’m Raven Kwok. I’m a visual artist / animator / creative programmer. My research and art mainly focuses on generative visual aesthetics using customized processes and algorithms in computer programming.</div>
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YS: I'm Yunling "Tracy" Song. I'm interested in audiovisual live performance. I'm also a generative artist doing programming, modulating video with sound.</div>
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CY: My name is Cao Yuxi aka James. I am a contemporary visual artist constructing with computers and digital video.</div>
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BCB: Describe AudioVisualVenue and how you three came to work together.</div>
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RK: I’m not an official member of AVV. James and Tracy invited me as a guest to present my recent project Build the Cities.</div>
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YS: James and I cofounded AudioVisualVenue as a collective for artists working with generative art and programming. We organize exhibitions in different locations to show our artworks, exploring different themes for each event.</div>
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CY: We started 2 years ago in China, back in Hangzhuo. We were inspired by festivals like Mapping Festival and Mutek. I realized there was no collective brand for Chinese artists; if you group together you become stronger.</div>
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BCB: Do AVV artists collaboratively create artworks or just collectively show your individual works?</div>
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YS: AVV presents solo artworks by the individual members.</div>
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CY: For now, it's individual; in the future, we plan live streaming events to connect artists in separate locations in the U.S. and China for realtime collaborative performances.</div>
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BCB: What are the esthetics of the AVV collective and its guests?</div>
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YS: This exhibition's theme is Tweak. We're not all professional programmers, however we create with code.</div>
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RK: We share similar working procedures and production pipelines, using code to blend art and technology with parametric and generative nature.</div>
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CY: We all use different tools but we share a process.</div>
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RK: I'm obsessed with form and shape - it's a pure love.</div>
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BCB: That pure love comes through in all of your work. You each have a process that you adhere to. How important is realtime? Raven, you showed a recorded video and then demonstrated the realtime systems used to make it. Yunling, you played entirely live. James, you mixed live and fixed media. Realtime responsive seems essential to the work you all presented.</div>
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Tracy: Realtime directly involves me in the project. If I'm not doing anything... if I stop, the work disappears. When I only have one chance to perform, everything connects through me: my emotions and mind.</div>
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CY: Currently, video and broadcast media are dominant formats around the world. We are looking a little ahead. Applications inject interactivity into broadcasting media. Back in China, I animated by keyframing - we set parameters, tested, then rendered. This is a low-efficiency way to work. Now, working with open source applications and game engines, we have more responsive tools.</div>
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RK: “Real-time” in my works is impromptu of the system itself. Albeit carefully designed, the system exhibits randomness depending on the set of seeds feeding in. An artist has absolute control over the system, yet passively watches while the system produces outcomes.</div>
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BCB: You each set up systems with rules and behaviors and then seed them. Tracy, you seed with geometric shapes and music. Raven, you seed with 3D shapes which recur based on certain rules. James seeds with data. These interactions are life-like processes.</div>
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RK: Instead of simply simulating and re-creating life-processes, I’m more interested in altering them to my will and seeing how the agents develop and organize themselves based on designated rules, like Christopher Langton said in his book Artificial Life: An Overview, “explore nature as it could have been.”</div>
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I create a system, then feed it - the source data is like nutrition for the system.</div>
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CY: We like to see what our systems shit out after they eat.</div>
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Like Raven said, I use data from the real world as nutrition for my system. People don't read raw data so well, but I create a pipeline to render real world data in an audiovisual form. I mutate the data, so people reconsider the information - to offer a different view of the world. At MINY I showed Macrocosm, which uses Beijing air pollution data to distort a Chinese painting, as a visual metaphor.</div>
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YS: I'm doing research about sound visualization and meanings of formal qualities. Some say blue represents cool, and yellow and red represents MacDonald's. I think Black and White can represent highs and lows and the dynamics of music, as in the work of Ryoji Ikeda.</div>
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RK: We're generating with a set of rules, instead of conventional animation or Visual FX.</div>
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Pioneering digital artists like Lillian F. Schwartz, Larry Cuba and Ken Knowlton created artworks through programming in the 1960s and 1970s. Code is not a new medium for artists, but it has become much more approachable in recent decades with the growth of the creative coding community. However, computational generative art is still emerging within the contemporary art world, due to its “discipline- and medium-independent” methodology and lack of philosophical standpoint.</div>
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CY: A lot of content I am using is like ready-mades. I didn't make the data.</div>
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BCB: You've stated that this is an unprecedented time for media artmaking tools; do you think the art world itself is changing? Is this more significant than the transition from oils to acrylics?</div>
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RK: All our resources are open - fans can get hands-on experience of the code. There's no invisible barrier to the working pipeline.</div>
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CY: I think it's time that artists came out of their ivory tower to touch the control tower. Now's a time when people can learn on their own, submit questions, follow online tutorials...</div>
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YS: The artist doesn't need to control everything. I can write my own programs, building from Raven's code. I don't think we should completely protect our artworks; it's good to share and get feedback from others.</div>
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CY: Right now it's hard to define the originality of any artwork. You don't make anything you grab - but the impact of the work you make with it is yours.</div>
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-22054767756489870402015-07-12T23:11:00.001-04:002015-07-12T23:29:12.455-04:00Chin Chih Yang Performance in New York<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">written by </span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Jeffrey Grunthaner</span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"> </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Queens-based artist Chin Chi Yang initially viewed his Earth Day performance, An Interactive Protest against Corporate Waste, which took place in Times Square and its environs this past April, as an opportunity to engage the world's largest banks and to discuss with the people who went about in them what they thought about recycling. What the performance became was a trance-like, collaborative "drift" through Times Square: a miniature pageant responding to, as Yang puts it, "audience's facial impressions and their minds." The following pictures were captured on site.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Photos courtesy of Doll and Nelson Liu</span></div>
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Location:<a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=New%20York,%20NY&z=10">New York, NY</a></div>
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-63242094343272109972015-03-05T18:56:00.000-05:002015-03-06T18:28:06.028-05:00ARMORY NEW YORK 2015<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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5 Booths to Bookmark at the Armory Show</h4>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">While essentially an agora where galleries from around the world showcase their wares in the form of commodities sold to the highest bidder or the savvy collector bargain hunting, the compactness of the works on display make the Armory show especially friendly to paintings, prints and photographs. Frameable works, after all, are portable like money. In the teeth of this commercial atmosphere, however, some galleries visibly stand out, largely for the diversity of the works they show if not for their innovation. Here are five booths you may want to visit, even if you left your checkbook at home.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">30 Rue Beaubourg, 75003 Paris, Frankreich </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">+33 1 42 72 14 10</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of the larger booths at the Armory, spanning some three cubical-like rooms, this French-based gallery will attract your attention with a Jonathan Meese painting, before luring you further into a white-walled brilliance where, among other treasures, Iván Navarro’s almost Flavin-esque “Vitrina” (2008) sits catty-corner from a Kehinde Wiley oil-on-canvas portrait that merges classically-styled inspirations with a decidedly hip-hop urbanity.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Andrew Kreps Gallery </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">537 W 22nd St #1, New York, NY 10011</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(212) 741-8849</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Andrew Kreps is showcasing popular favorites such as Mike Kelly (if only this artist’s relatively unimpressive </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Color and Form</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> works) to less spectacular yet more impressive items by artists such as Barbara T. Smith, whose 1971 mixed-media picture “Field Piece Schemata 1” will astonish you with its contemporaneity and liveliness.</span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-M-Dno0MWHuw/VPjjC-j_ZDI/AAAAAAAAK5o/OjB80zYx_tc/s1600/DSC_0368.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-M-Dno0MWHuw/VPjjC-j_ZDI/AAAAAAAAK5o/OjB80zYx_tc/s1600/DSC_0368.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Barbara T. Smith</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Collage, photo, resin</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">55 Delancey St, New York, NY 10002</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(212) 577-1201</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Unquestionably one of the most interesting galleries in NYC today, James Fuentes's booth at the Armory features chatoyant plexiglass structures by Berta Fischer.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Whether hanging by plastic threads or shimmering i<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: normal; white-space: normal;">ridescently like a rainbow</span> on the walls Fischer's works will not fail to impress.</span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cCdzsYOhJg8/VPjlQOWcOtI/AAAAAAAAK54/6OIzzwtbUaw/s1600/MOV_0338.mp4" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cCdzsYOhJg8/VPjlQOWcOtI/AAAAAAAAK54/6OIzzwtbUaw/s1600/MOV_0338.mp4" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">16 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW, Vereinigtes Königreich</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">+44 20 7336 8109</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Victoria Miro somehow encapsulates what shows like the Armory could be about: a vast of array of work by artists from all around the world. To be sure, the bulk of the paintings in Victoria Miro’s booth will remind you of other paintings by other artists, but the Alice Neel's work “Richard with Dog,” dating from 1954, is a work you can live and grow with.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yancy Richardson</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">525 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(646) 230-9610</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Comprising mainly photographs, this gallery displays work that gently disrupts the conventions of portraiture and documentary. Matthew Jensen`s daybright illuminations of cross country travel through the United States—“ 49 States” (2008–9) doesn’t feel like Americana so much as a series of pictures drenched in the expansiveness of perception on the ordinary. Zanele Muholi's portraits, by contrast, toy with the conventions of photographic portraiture to make confrontationally realer-than life studies of black youths whose faces and postures become starkly eloquent against a studio-constructed backdrop.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Zanele Muholi</span></div>
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-33521485189563791662015-03-03T18:21:00.002-05:002015-03-03T18:27:59.337-05:00The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, MoMA<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, Trebuchet, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px; white-space: pre-wrap;">A review of “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World,” exhibiting at MoMa, </span></span></b></span><strong style="background-color: white; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; font-family: helveticaneue, 'helvetica neue', helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17.9400005340576px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">December 14, 2014–April 5, 2015</strong></div>
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<strong style="background-color: white; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; color: #666666; font-family: helveticaneue, 'helvetica neue', helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17.9400005340576px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><i style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-weight: normal; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">written by Jeffrey Grunthaner in New York</i></strong></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Comprising only 17 painters—ranging from the youth sensation <span class="il">Oscar</span> Murillo to veterans like Mary Weatherford—MoMA’s </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Forever Now </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">aspires to be a hip survey of what’s possible for painting today. In fact, it’s only trendy. If one were to take the exhibition at its word, the internet has radically transformed our lives and the way we reproduce images. Starting from this truism, is it possible that MoMA wants to show us painters without any sense of a historical past? Inveighing for an eternal present where the variegated richness of time perishes into an a-temporal “synchrony,” collapsing the difference between “high” and “low”—none of this is original circa 2015, and doesn’t explain why the bulk of the art in the exhibition alludes to 20</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10px; vertical-align: super; white-space: pre-wrap;">th</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> century art and iconography. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Oscar Murillo. 7+. 2013–14 </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You linger over the Murillo's as much as the two works by Lauren Owens, mainly on account of their intrinsic powers of display. Kerstin Brätsch torments you as much as she delights; and Michael Williams’s works are anodynes that numb any care for a world on fire. The question is: Why are they here? Lauren Owens certainly uses “new media” in her work, if only allusively. Using traditional materials such as acrylics on gesso, Owens simulates the layered contraction of space specific to digitally generated images. The materials Owens puts to use function like a glass partition, through which she can observe the weirdling movements of digital space in quarantine. But <span class="il">Oscar</span> Murillo's? Not only does Murillo's work lack the image-sourced tenor the show seems to want to convey, but his works are absent of any threat to the art establishment generally. One feels in them the lurking possibility of usurpation—like a bomb mounted to a wall—but ultimately they're cased in glass and thoroughly diffused. (This is especially true for the work situated on the floor.) None of it reflects the overarching idea of the exhibition; nor does it speak from Murillo's own voice, which seems to provoke a human response in viewers, preferencing interactivity over the passive contemplation of spectacle. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Forever Now</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is not bereft of fascinating work. The artist who best represents the “vast synchronic landscape of information peculiar to our century,” as MoMA words it, is decidedly the German-born post-internet painter Kerstin Brätsch, currently represented by Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in NYC. Brätsch’s largely collaborative practice--like her homage to Sigmar Polke, which was made in collaboration with someone who had worked with Polke personally--not only disturbs traditional notions of individuated genius (a hard-won status in a digitally interconnected and remorselessly surveilled world), but at the very least suggests, however imperfectly, new compositional strategies for introducing painting into areas of experience normally reserved for sculpture or design.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 19.9333343505859px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">Kerstin Brätsch. Sigi's Erben (Agate Psychics). 2012</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Consider “Sigi's Erben (Agate Psychics)” (2012). Something about the work reminded me of dream I once had about a spider-like network of wires rising from the earth. From the wires hanged mirrors, and people would look into them and see themselves fragmented, confusing their fragmented image for their actual selves. The wire construction itself was called Eternity. “Sigi Erben” develops a similar theme: Brätsch’s network of glass pictures speaks to the fragmentation consequent on visual culture generally, where old notions of a compositional whole are somehow lost. While not exactly impressive, this genre-defying installation does indicate a way out of painting’s need to create illusive space, to develop likenesses to a figure/ground relationship. </span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If one considers the gestural brushstroke the defining aspect of modern painting, and likeness to a figure the hallmark of classical modes, “Sigi Erben” exhibits how these aspects have been modified through the adoption of new compositional methods, altered even further by the assimilation of unique materials. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The work not only alludes to Sigmar Polke, but renders a kind of exploded diagram of different methods of seeing. “Sigi's Erben” seems to make an issue of being unimpressive, using what looks like a network of steel pipes to display glass pictures at different levels relative to the eye. What’s most significant about “Sigi Erben”, however, is the mix of porousness and impenetrability intrinsic to its display. </span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The predominant material is glass, and yet the pictures themselves are not transparent, being filled in by wonky colors that lend them an object-like solidity. Placed high atop the pipe-like structure, like birds nesting in a tree, one sees through the work as a whole, one can even walk through it. Insofar as it references Sigmar Polke,“Sigi Erben” is an utterance, an homage translated into an environment. As an independent work a-temporally afloat in the “vast synchronic landscape of information peculiar to our century,” it synthetically extends the concept of “a grid,” bestowing on it a fluidity not normally associated with the term. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After painting, the question is not so much how to represent a singular image, but how to make the plastic aspects of a delimited picture present in an IRL way. Can art be an environment, an immersive world-like experience, and still be art? MoMA’s </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Forever Now</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> implies this question, but just as suddenly veers away from any definite answer. As a whole, the show feels almost careless, inconsequential, even in a world given over to a-temporality.</span></div>
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-2014976708851915252015-01-26T06:32:00.000-05:002015-01-27T16:39:14.765-05:00'My Heroine And Her Mate', Dorothy Iannone, Peres Projects, Berlin<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b>A review of “My Heroine And Her Mate,” exhibiting at Peres Projects January 17 – February 28.</b><br />
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<i>written by Jeffrey Grunthaner in Berlin</i><br />
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Contemporary paintings, insofar as they take their cues from the collage-like flatness conditioned by a computer screen, have an inclusiveness about them resembling glass tanks full of compendious stuff—an assortment of gestural brush work, quasi-geometric shapes and graduated contours. Looking at the early work of Dorothy Iannone, however, whose show “My Heroine And Her Mate” is currently exhibiting at Peres Projects in Berlin, we can’t help but appreciate the pre-digital texturing that was dependent on Ab-Exy type abstraction.<br />
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<i style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); text-align: left;">Dorothy Iannone</i></div>
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<i>"My Heroine And Her Mate" (1962)</i></div>
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<i>Painting - Oil, paper collage, acrylic on canvas </i></div>
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<i>164 x 151 cm (64.57 x 59.45 in)</i></div>
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Iannone’s early paintings have an urbanity about them that belies the love-haunted connotations of their titles, retailoring conventionally dead-end forms of abstraction to suit the aspirations of her highly individualized eroticism and wit. <br />
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Layered with almost cartographic designs—like cubistic grids become both plastic and deliquescent—Iannone’s paintings brim with ebullient confidence, underwritten by the fact that most of the pieces in the show were made in 1962 (the others date from 1963 and 1964). Lingering over these early works, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Joe Brainard’s poetic dictum that his paintings be “present.” Regarding Iannone, this translates into canvases so thick with paint and collaged materials (even wall paper, to my eyes at least) that they literally come off the canvas and occupy a space one with the viewer’s body. <br />
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While not especially large by today’s standards (Trudy Benson certainly goes much larger), Ionnone’s painterly declarations of love radiate an intimacy that can only be accounted for by the way her materials (mainly acrylic) are shaped into tactile relief on canvas.<br />
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The young Iannone tended to develop compositions without any clear locus or center, keeping her paintings in a perpetual state of movement, making her themes (however abstractly presented) interesting still circa 2015. “Secret Blossom” (1962) was one painting I returned to numerous times at the opening. It’s a work you can wholly lose yourself in, admiring both the skill that went into developing such a harmonious arrangement out of such quotidian materials (one material seemed to be wallpaper, but the gallery just lists “paper”) and the creative gusto that was able to put these materials to such sculptural ends. <br />
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“Secret Blossom” might be better appreciated today than when it was originally painted, as the contemporary gaze no longer harshly condemns paintings for having a decorative flare. Other highlights of the show include “The Sea Where Cleopatra Bathed” (1964), “Attention!” (1962), and “Dark Lips” (1964). <br />
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<i>Dorothy Iannone</i></div>
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<i><i>Secret Blossom, 1962</i></i></div>
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<i><i>Painting - Oil, paper collage, acrylic on canvas</i></i></div>
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<i>165 x 152.5 cm (64.96 x 60.04 in)</i></div>
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Peres Projects <br />
Karl-Marx-Allee 82<br />
10243 Barlin Germany <br />
tel <a href="tel:+49%2030%20275%20950%20700" x-apple-data-detectors-result="1/0" x-apple-data-detectors-type="telephone" x-apple-data-detectors="true">+49 30 275 950 700</a><br />
berlin@peresprojects.com<br />
www.peresprojects.com<br />
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Location:<a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Berlin,%20Germany&z=10">Berlin, Germany</a></div>
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-11255038931756441752014-05-29T18:13:00.000-04:002014-05-29T18:19:31.208-04:00Walton Ford at Paul Kasmin<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Walton Ford shows an impressive new body of work at Paul Kasmin gallery from May 1 - June 21, 2014.</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>written by Nathalie Zwimpfer in New York</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Watercolors</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Ford continues his practice of painting animals in their rawest emotions. In his latest paintings we see half a dozen of owls fighting over a caught mouse, an angry tigress confused by thousands of glass balls, a giant snake that swallows a swarm of birds, a tied-up, biting, monstrous wolf, a pipe-smoking mandrill, a drinking monkey and a flying gorilla.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At first sight the seven large-scale watercolor paintings look like naturalist illustrations from the 19th century, painted during colonial excursions. However, the paintings have many more layers to them and move way beyond the purpose of illustration. They have narrative components and symbolic elements creating a dream-like presence with details full of dark humor. Ford’s paintings show uncanny scenes of violence, rich in disturbing melodrama. There is something odd about the depicted animals, too dramatic to be a scientific portrayal of the world’s fauna.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The paintings tell more about humans than animals. It is human history that is being referenced despite the pictured raw feral behavior of the beasts. Ford’s paintings deal with how we perceive the animal world and how we simply project our own experiences, history and expectations onto it. Therefore, the paintings hardly reference scientific facts but rather the human fascination for the unknown feral world. Ford himself claims that he wasn’t particularly interested in animals themselves but more in their representation. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">He once stated in an interview:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I do a huge amount of research on animals. But it’s the person that gives me a way in. Animals in the wild are boring. Before Fay Wray comes to Skull Island, King Kong isn’t doing anything. There’s no story until she shows up. What I’m doing, I think, is a sort of cultural history of the way animals live in the human imagination.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ford’s paintings reference texts found in colonial literature, folklore stories, mythological writings and other sources. One of his latest paintings called </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Graf Zeppelin</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> tells the story of gorilla Susie, the first and only trained gorilla at her time, brought to America in a first-class cabin on the Graf Zeppelin in 1929. She was captured in the Belgian Congo about 3 years earlier and shipped to France after her parents were violently shot.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With sadness, Susie gazes at the viewer. Her posture indicates that she's not feeling comfortable. She sits huddled in the corner of a sofa, shoulders pulled up, tightly holding her foot with one hand. The sofa’s beautiful fabric, the cabin’s floral wallpaper and the heavy red curtains suggest an upscale and elaborate surrounding.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Susie was </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">extracted from her natural environment,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> taken up in the air on board of an airship </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and flown</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">across the Atlantic. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Through the cabin’s window only the vast ocean and a lonely ship are visible below the zeppelin. On the table and to Susie’s left lie tangerines, grapes, carrots, pears and a pomegranate - a poor substitute to her natural diet or habitat.
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img alt="DSC05049_resize.jpg" height="302" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/5UoiVeEssAoDyK4IuRNeozErxjj3rPI08kbYBLVenFHWlwPudZcm2vVu7jRMUIsMpujRrKVen3_tA82U5WFBqr2KRJS9LHM_1aKRfgTNjoIzKTQRg3DEfHEtANEVS_MVdw" style="-webkit-transform: rotate(0rad); border: none;" width="400" /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Walton Ford</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">watercolor, gouache and ink on paper</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ford often adds text to the paintings in his usual thin, cursive, old-fashioned looking writing. However, along with the painting </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Windsor, May, 1829 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">depicting the smoking mandrill Jack, for the first time in his body of work, Ford writes down a few sentences telling the story from the apes’ own perspective </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">on the bottom of the paper</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I no longer feel like biting. All the strangeness has made me very tired. The people here have flat faces, the color of tongues. They bark loudly and move quickly. They offer food to me, most of it soft and sweet. I am out of the rain almost always now, inside hard shelters. This shelter seems to be moving. I feel like I’m sitting on a high branch in the wind… being carried somehow. I remember the feeling, of being carried through the warm rain on my mother’s back; my hands and feet gripping her wet fur...rolling along… floating along… the green wet world passing above and below. Now I’m being carried along very high and far. The cool rain passes out there, but in here my fur is dry; and these chattering people carry piles of fruit and watch me while I eat it.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Although humans are rarely depicted in Ford paintings, they are very present. Susie is located in a human made environment - a cabin on an airship. Nothing resembles the gorilla’s natural habitat in the Belgian Congo, where it was caught. In </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Graf Zeppelin </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ford gives the gorilla a voice. Susie describes her situation in the unnatural environment, remembering and missing the time with her mother in the jungle, mentioning how men watch her eat. Susie becomes an attraction to satisfy human’s fascination for the wild. The tragic text evokes pity from the viewer. We can relate to the gorillas emotions: Weariness, discomfort, homesickness and yearning. However, whose words are these really? Ford is letting the animal use English language to communicate in a diary-like fashion with many human attributes. In the end we have to admit that it is what we think goes through the gorilla’s mind, while her words become no more than a human projection.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is not the first time that a text has been written by men from gorilla Susie’s perspective: In 1945, the Cincinnati zoo - the zoo that eventually purchased Susie - published a 6 page booklet on the gorilla. The publication is titled </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A brief history of “Susie”. world famous gorilla. as told by her, to her trainer W.M. Dressman. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In this short text her journey from the Belgian Congo, over France to the US is explained from her perspective. There are also some facts given about gorillas in captivity. The last part of the text uses Susie’s voice to advertise the zoo by inviting people and their friends to visit her, letting them know her performance schedule. The animal is exploited for commercial purposes.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Once again Ford’s most recent works are allegories of war, politics and imperialism and remain a critique of the history of colonialism and our relationship towards the animal world. However, in his latest set of painting he’s adding a more emotional component by deftly triggering the spectator’s empathy. Hence, the viewer becomes more involved in the stories that are being told and eventually is being pulled into the arena away from the spectator’s seat.</span></div>
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-29611272211858197852014-05-26T00:16:00.000-04:002014-05-26T00:20:25.429-04:00THE WEEK AHEAD | Art Comments Desk<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">May 25 - May 31</b><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><i>Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since the 1950s</i></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.</span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">October 24, 2013 – May 26, 2014</span></div></div><div><a href="http://bit.ly/1nJpz2t">http://bit.ly/1nJpz2t</a></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><img class="alignnone" alt="" src="http://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=http://www.hirshhorn.si.edu/dynamic/press_images/damage_control/Nara_No_Nukes.jpg&max=500" width="500" height="372" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; height: auto; max-width: 100%;"><br>Yoshitomo Nara, <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">No Nukes (in the floating world)</em>, 1999. Courtesy of Eileen Harris Norton.</span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">May 28, 7–9 PM</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">United Kingdom</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><img src="https://graphicalhouse-cca.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9cbbb72a-a156-4923-997f-5285216efb28as-Bas675.jpg" style="border: 0px; vertical-align: middle; height: 250px; display: block; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px auto; width: auto !important;"><figcaption style="margin-bottom: 0px;"><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 100px 0px 0px;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Still from La-Bas, 2006.</span></p></figcaption></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Opening reception: May 29, 6.30–8.30 PM</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">May 29 - August 2, 2014</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Limoncello</span></div>
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com0Manhattan Manhattan40.705081 -73.989746tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-33666526651385506492014-04-25T14:49:00.000-04:002014-04-25T14:49:41.088-04:00THE WEEK AHEAD | Art Comments Desk<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b>April 20 - April 26</b><br />
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<b>ANDY WARHOL</b></div>
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<i>13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World's Fair</i></div>
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Queens Museum<br />Opening Reception: April 26, 2014, 6-8pm followed by an opening party, 8pm–12am</div>
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On View: April 27–Sept 7, 2014</div>
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New York</div>
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<a href="http://www.queensmuseum.org/exhibitions/2013/11/08/andy-warhols-13-most-wanted-men-and-the-1964-worlds-fair/">http://www.queensmuseum.org/exhibitions/2013/11/08/andy-warhols-13-most-wanted-men-and-the-1964-worlds-fair/</a><br /></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1YjReawA6h8/U1qmMaGyGmI/AAAAAAAAKbM/5PZv9dLdYgk/s1600/warhol.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1YjReawA6h8/U1qmMaGyGmI/AAAAAAAAKbM/5PZv9dLdYgk/s1600/warhol.jpg" height="202" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b>GUERINO MAZZOLA</b></div>
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Discussion</div>
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e-flux</div>
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April 25, 7–9 PM</div>
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New York</div>
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<a href="http://www.e-flux.com/program/reza-negarestani-and-guerino-mazzola-presented-by-glass-bead/">http://www.e-flux.com/program/reza-negarestani-and-guerino-mazzola-presented-by-glass-bead/</a><br /></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-x0EsVEs2JzE/U1qp__NCFvI/AAAAAAAAKbU/D8cNs6TnJYg/s1600/th_b6013a5beacabcb919d3a6564ae91b58_apr11_glassbead_img.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-x0EsVEs2JzE/U1qp__NCFvI/AAAAAAAAKbU/D8cNs6TnJYg/s1600/th_b6013a5beacabcb919d3a6564ae91b58_apr11_glassbead_img.jpg" height="320" width="256" /></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 13.197600364685059px; text-align: start;">Charles Sanders Peirce, </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 13.197600364685059px; text-align: start;">Labyrinth</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 13.197600364685059px; text-align: start;">. <br />From Charles Sanders Peirce papers, MS Am 1632 (1537). <br />Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.</span></div>
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<b>SPENCER SWEENEY</b></div>
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Opening reception: April 25, 7–8 PM</div>
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April 25 - June 21, 2014</div>
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Brussels</div>
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C L E A R I N G</div>
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<a href="http://www.c-l-e-a-r-i-n-g.com/home">http://www.c-l-e-a-r-i-n-g.com/home</a></div>
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-68372593162268881632014-02-23T21:16:00.001-05:002014-02-23T21:42:20.584-05:00THE WEEK AHEAD | Art Comments Desk<b>February 24 - March 2</b><div><b><br></b></div><div><b>ALICE CREISCHER</b></div><div><i>In the Stomach of the Predators</i></div><div>Opening reception: February 28, 6pm</div><div>March 1 - April 19, 2014</div><div>Berlin</div><div>http://www.kow-berlin.info/exhibitions/alice_creischer</div><div>Gallery@kow-Berlin.com</div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-O3ptfNQ9dYY/Uwqrgw1yvmI/AAAAAAAAKXA/yzTOAb97CDM/s640/blogger-image--834821454.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-O3ptfNQ9dYY/Uwqrgw1yvmI/AAAAAAAAKXA/yzTOAb97CDM/s640/blogger-image--834821454.jpg"></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><b>RENÉ DANIËLS</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Solo exhibition</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Opening reception: February 28, 6 - 8 PM</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">February 28 - March 29, 2014</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">New York</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">http://www.metropicturesgallery.com/exhibitions/2014-02-28_ren-danils/</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="mailto:gallery@metropictures.com">gallery@metropictures.com</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ZR90vRqngpk/UwqrhyKBc4I/AAAAAAAAKXI/aDnIpULMmlk/s640/blogger-image-1466871580.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ZR90vRqngpk/UwqrhyKBc4I/AAAAAAAAKXI/aDnIpULMmlk/s640/blogger-image-1466871580.jpg"></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><b>EMILY JACIR</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>intervals</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Opening reception: March 1, 6 - 8 PM</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">March 1 - April 5, 2014</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">New York</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">http://www.alexanderandbonin.com</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-bvM0nP0faCo/Uwqt2hX_3OI/AAAAAAAAKXU/U4pEjskOF6w/s640/blogger-image--890693139.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-bvM0nP0faCo/Uwqt2hX_3OI/AAAAAAAAKXU/U4pEjskOF6w/s640/blogger-image--890693139.jpg"></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><b>HARSH PATEL</b></div><i>New Typography</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Opening reception: March 2, 6 - 8 PM</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">March 2 - 30, 2014</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Brooklyn, New York</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">http://www.cleopatras.us/#/upcoming--4</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-r64CmLgTWWI/Uwqt3VQCc3I/AAAAAAAAKXc/466nXYa0-ow/s640/blogger-image-183710145.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-r64CmLgTWWI/Uwqt3VQCc3I/AAAAAAAAKXc/466nXYa0-ow/s640/blogger-image-183710145.jpg"></a></div><br></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br></div></div></div><br></div>Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-87930209707530965292013-12-18T18:31:00.001-05:002013-12-19T10:01:15.945-05:00AC INTERVIEW, Stefanos Tsivopoulos at Art Basel<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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While at Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Comments interviewed artist Stefanos Tsivopoulos at the booth of Kalfayan Galleries. Born in Prague but based in Amsterdam and Athens, Stenfanos also represented Greece at this year's Venice Biennale with his solo exhibition 'History Zero'.<br />
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<span class="s3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-weight: bold;">How does this exhibition here at Art Basel Positions relate or extend the work presented in the Greek pavilion at the Venice biennale this summer?</span></div>
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<span class="s4">In a couple of ways, first, </span><span class="s4">it</span><span class="s4">’</span><span class="s4">s</span><span class="s4"> </span><span class="s4">the</span><span class="s4"> world premiere</span><span class="s4"> </span><span class="s4">of </span><span class="s4">the single channel version of the triptych </span><span class="s4"><i>History Zero</i> </span><span class="s4">that was shown in Venice. And the second way is I am taking </span><span class="s4">a step further </span><span class="s4">with the alternative currencies</span><span class="s4">, which was in the central part of the pavilion</span><span class="s4"> in Venice</span><span class="s4"> by </span><span class="s4">making </span><span class="s4">my own proposal of an alternative currency which </span><span class="s4">suggests</span><span class="s4"> an imaginary way </span><span class="s4">of </span><span class="s4">exchanging. Th</span><span class="s4">is new currency is</span><span class="s4"> </span><span class="s4">a </span><span class="s4">handmade </span><span class="s4">crocheted doily </span><span class="s4">that </span><span class="s4">bears the words </span><i><span class="s4">“</span><span class="s4">Fuck the </span><span class="s5"> </span><span class="s4">” </span></i><span class="s4">(it</span><span class="s4">’</span><span class="s4">s also the title of the work) </span><span class="s4">and </span><span class="s4">comes together with </span><span class="s4">a </span><span class="s4">series of three photographs that show different gestures and use of the doily.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Stefanos Tsivopoulos</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Fuck the <span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; text-align: left;">€</span></i></span></div>
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<span class="s4" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><b>What's the risk of proposing a system as opposed to critiquing a system?</b></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s4">If you look a bit more carefully, the way my proposal is articulated is based on human exchange, on trust, mutual trust, and the idea of the gift. The idea of the gift as a concept and as a sacred economy</span><span class="s4"> </span><span class="s4">was </span><span class="s4">thoroughly </span><span class="s4">developed </span><span class="s4">by Charles Eisenstein. His concept is that we can propose a new way of exchange through different objects and different systems of communication. This is</span><span class="s4"> </span><span class="s4">an imaginary, </span><span class="s4">I would say, utopian </span><span class="s4">way of human exchange.</span></span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Stefanos Tsivopoulos<br />History Zero</span></i></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s3" style="font-weight: bold;">This way of exchange relates to your posters here at the bo</span><span class="s3" style="font-weight: bold;">o</span><span class="s3" style="font-weight: bold;">th. Is this your gift?</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s4">Yes. The</span><span class="s4"> </span><span class="s4">piece is called <i>Residue</i>, and it was inspired by my walks in Athens. I'm from Greece and over the years I've seen people </span><span class="s4">displaying </span><span class="s4">different </span><span class="s4">commodities </span><span class="s4">that</span><span class="s4"> look like luxury products such as Chanel </span><span class="s4">wallets, bags, shoes, etc </span><span class="s4">but they are </span><span class="s4">actually </span><span class="s4">cheap </span><span class="s4">imitations </span><span class="s4">made in </span><span class="s4">China. </span><span class="s4">This</span><span class="s4"> is</span><span class="s4"> part of the economic situation that reflects the </span><span class="s4">current crisis</span><span class="s4"> in Greece. Most of th</span><span class="s4">ese</span><span class="s4"> </span><span class="s4">products </span><span class="s4">are </span><span class="s4">sold</span><span class="s4"> by immigrants </span><span class="s4">living in</span><span class="s4"> Greece, and th</span><span class="s4">at</span><span class="s4">’</span><span class="s4">s</span><span class="s4"> their way of making ends meet.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s4">And the second poster, again, </span><span class="s4">is </span><span class="s4">coming from the streets of Athens</span><span class="s4">.</span><span class="s4"> Angela Merkel, the counselor of Germany who is highly related to the economic crisis in Greece visited Athens </span><span class="s4">back in 2012 </span><span class="s4">. There were a lot of demonstrations on the streets, so I </span><span class="s4">tried to </span><span class="s4">collect</span><span class="s4"> some of the stones and debris that were thrown during the protests. </span><span class="s4">I</span><span class="s4">n the end I</span><span class="s4"> took a picture of the</span><span class="s4"> pile of </span><span class="s4">stones</span><span class="s4">. Two elements contradicting one another but at the same time </span><span class="s4">both </span><span class="s4">reflect</span><span class="s4"> the economic situation in Athens.</span></span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Stefanos Tsivopoulos</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Residue</span></i></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s3" style="font-weight: bold;">What</span><span class="s3" style="font-weight: bold;">’</span><span class="s3" style="font-weight: bold;">s the challenge or opportunity for art during moments of crisis?</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s4">I think </span><span class="s4">art is </span><span class="s4">affected</span><span class="s4"> </span><span class="s4">by crisis</span><span class="s4"> but</span><span class="s4"> </span><span class="s4">art has its own mechanisms to push back or find ways to present itself with new ideas. I think art can be much greater and much bigger than any kind of crisis because it takes it</span><span class="s4"> inside its own system and somehow </span><span class="s4">makes new propositions </span><span class="s4">and brings to the front new ideas.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s4">For example, in my own country I see that people are coming closer now because of the crisis. The idea of art as a commodity or </span><span class="s4">just </span><span class="s4">as an art object changed a lot because there</span><span class="s4">’</span><span class="s4">s no such market anymore in Greece. People are away from the burden that they have to produce </span><span class="s4">just a marketable </span><span class="s4">object</span><span class="s4">. The</span><span class="s4">y want much more than that. </span><span class="s4"></span><span class="s4">A</span><span class="s4">rt bec</span><span class="s4">a</span><span class="s4">me</span><span class="s4"> more socially engaged and more critical towards </span><span class="s4">society</span><span class="s4"> </span><span class="s4">and </span><span class="s4">that brings</span><span class="s4"> artists </span><span class="s4">together </span><span class="s4">by </span><span class="s4">forming </span><span class="s4">new initiatives and </span><span class="s4">alliances</span><span class="s4">,</span><span class="s4"> which is fantastic</span><span class="s4">!</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><b><span class="s4">W</span><span class="s3">hat disciplines or experiences inform your work? Obviously economic concerns, but what else informs your production</span><span class="s4">?</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s4">I</span><span class="s4">’</span><span class="s4">m</span><span class="s4"> working </span><span class="s4">a lot </span><span class="s4">with </span><span class="s4">history and </span><span class="s4">archival material. One of </span><span class="s4">my</span><span class="s4"> major </span><span class="s4">projects </span><span class="s4">was for Manifesta 8 back in 2010 where I</span><span class="s4"> did</span><span class="s4"> a lot of on location work and research </span><span class="s4">and that</span><span class="s4">’</span><span class="s4">s where the </span><span class="s4">film</span><span class="s4">’</span><span class="s4">s </span><span class="s4">are </span><span class="s4">based. This research involved</span><span class="s4"> a lot of </span><span class="s4">search on </span><span class="s4">archival photography and film as well </span><span class="s4">as local history</span><span class="s4"> and myths</span><span class="s4">, poetry, </span><span class="s4">and </span><span class="s4">other </span><span class="s4">findings </span><span class="s4">around the subject matter. It</span><span class="s4">’</span><span class="s4">s a</span><span class="s4"> bit like the work of a historian or </span><span class="s4">an </span><span class="s4">archaeologist who digs in the past and </span><span class="s4">into the </span><span class="s4">history of things. </span><span class="s4">I</span><span class="s4">’</span><span class="s4">m tracing </span><span class="s4">the roots</span><span class="s4"> of the tree</span><span class="s4">, </span><span class="s4">interested </span><span class="s4">in the origin of </span><span class="s4">things </span><span class="s4">a</span><span class="s4">nd for me this is a way of </span><span class="s4">dealing with what</span><span class="s4">’</span><span class="s4">s happening nowadays. Even though I go back in history</span><span class="s4">, it</span><span class="s4">’</span><span class="s4">s</span><span class="s4"> always in relation to </span><span class="s4">the present and future.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Stefanos Tsivopoulos</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Fuck the <span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; text-align: left;">€</span></i></span></div>
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<span class="s3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-weight: bold;">One of the things we like about your work is the way you approach history. At Art Comments we often discuss the notion of history as a medium and as something that is alive.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s4">If I may, there's a very interesting </span><span class="s4">recent </span><span class="s4">example</span><span class="s4">. </span><span class="s4">For several years </span><span class="s4">I</span><span class="s4">’</span><span class="s4">m</span><span class="s4"> collecting </span><span class="s4">archival photographs and </span><span class="s4">some of them are </span><span class="s4">from the </span><span class="s4">N</span><span class="s4">ational </span><span class="s4">T</span><span class="s4">elevision </span><span class="s4">of Greece. A few months ago the National </span><span class="s4">Television </span><span class="s4">was </span><span class="s4">seized </span><span class="s4">once and for all </span><span class="s4">because the government </span><span class="s4">austerity plans </span><span class="s4">demanded the layoff of a</span><span class="s4">lmost two and a half thousand people</span><span class="s4">.</span><span class="s4"> </span><span class="s4">T</span><span class="s4">he whole institution and 75 years </span><span class="s4">of broadcasting </span><span class="s4">collapsed</span><span class="s4"> overnight</span><span class="s4">. Black screens </span><span class="s4">appeared </span><span class="s4">on </span><span class="s4">TVs </span><span class="s4">all over Greece </span><span class="s4">and </span><span class="s4">the Greek people were like, "oh, my god." </span><span class="s4">That was terrible news n</span><span class="s4">ot only </span><span class="s4">because of </span><span class="s4">the layoffs </span><span class="s4">but also</span><span class="s4"> </span><span class="s4">because it was a</span><span class="s4"> black </span><span class="s4">day </span><span class="s4">for democracy </span><span class="s4">and</span><span class="s4"> </span><span class="s4">for the freedom </span><span class="s4">of speech.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s4">I</span><span class="s4">’</span><span class="s4">m </span><span class="s4">left </span><span class="s4">with all this material </span><span class="s4">in my hands </span><span class="s4">and I </span><span class="s4">wonder about its new meaning. I </span><span class="s4">d</span><span class="s4">o</span><span class="s4">n't know </span><span class="s4">how </span><span class="s4">to approach </span><span class="s4">it </span><span class="s4">or how to deal with </span><span class="s4">it</span><span class="s4"> anymore</span><span class="s4">. </span><span class="s4">I feel that these</span><span class="s4"> images</span><span class="s4"> have a completely new value</span><span class="s4"> now</span><span class="s4">. So the idea of history is not something that is frozen in the past. Images </span><span class="s4">and history </span><span class="s4">are charg</span><span class="s4">ing</span><span class="s4"> constantly and </span><span class="s4">reactivated in different ways </span><span class="s4">according to</span><span class="s4"> </span><span class="s4">our lives now.</span></span></div>
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-4410162831426635242013-11-15T00:18:00.001-05:002013-11-24T23:28:27.735-05:0053rd Venice Biennale Interview<div><font face="Helvetica Neue Light, HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif">This past summer Art Comments sat with independent curator Stamatina Gregory at a local cafe in Venice, Italy to discuss her involvement with the Bahamas pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, a pavilion that featured the cerebral and risk-taking artist Tavarares Jackson.</font></div><div><br></div><div><b>Working on the first inaugural Bahamas pavilion must be exciting and stressful.</b></div><div><br></div><div>It is definitely exciting and stressful at the same time. I mean, this is the kind of project that has taken a tremendous amount of planning, and primarily on behalf of the artist. So it's been over 2 and a half years in the planning process, including both the conception and the installation of the work. And also the negotiation process with the government because it is not like doing a show with an institution. There's a lot more diplomacy involved. This woman right here, Amanda Paulson, the director of the National Gallery of the Bahamas, is Bahammien, I'm not. Although she wasn't involved in this iteration of the pavilion. She'll likely be involved with future iterations. I've learned about the structures of the Bahammien ministries through her. She's dealing with the culture side. Definitely exciting and stressful. You want to make sure that people notice the work you've done. And this was really important for the artist, Tavares Strachan. He wanted to have a real presence here at the Biennale. Even having a presence at the Arsenale already disrupts expectations about the representation of the Bahamas. And so that was the first step, to make sure that there was real visibility and that you were not in some broken down pallazzo somewhere. And also, through the installation completely disrupt expectations about what art from that country or an artist from that country might look like. A number of people viewing the exhibition came up to me and this was kind of shocking and they said, 'But the Bahamas is not cold.' So you are disrupting expectations, and you are speaking not only to an art world audience but you are also speaking to a general audience in many ways.</div><div><br></div><div><b>Can you talk about the differences in working in a commercial gallery setting, non-profit sectors and the biennale?</b></div><div><br></div><div>The area that I've had the least experience is the commercial gallery setting. I actually have not curated many exhibitions for commercial galleries. And within that category there's a huge range. You can curate an exhibition for a gallery that is somehow invested in this exhibition and you're showing a particular artists work that might sell, and so therefore money might be invested in the installation, planning and associated materials. But in my experience doing work for commercial galleries has been a labor of love for smaller commercial galleries where there actually isn't a lot of capital. And you notice that too in international biennale exhibitions that it kind of falls on the dealer to finance a lot but it is only a certain category of a dealer that can do that or do it on a certain level.</div><div><br></div><div>Most of my curating has been with institutions, either museums or non-profit institutions so I am used to working under stricter budgets. But also having the infrastructure of the museum or the institution on my side. Which makes a really big difference. And here it is completely different, I am one small part of an amazing team that made this happen. And I am one of the minor players that is behind the tremendous force, that is the artist Tavares Strachan. And he in many ways is the person closest to these negotiations. There's negotiations between the government of the Bahamas with the institutional structure of the biennale. It's been a learning process for everyone. The installation presents its own set of challenges and the negotiation presents its own set of challenges. And of course, here in Venice, installing anything is challenging. And so for me, I've primarily been on the communication side, I've done a lot of writing, editing and contextualizing of the exhibition in preparation to our opening for a long period of time. And that's primarily been my role as that kind of facilitator but also as part of a small team where everyone does everything when needed.</div><div><br></div><div><b>Is that the role of being a director of programs and education?</b></div><div><br></div><div>In part. I organized a small program that we had the other day a talk between Tavares (5:38)and it was moderated by Eric Shiner. In the beginning I think we had a much more ambitious program in mind. In the crush of the few days of the preview of the Biennale, reality starts to set in, the work is discursive on its own and all the layers of discursivity don’t need another discursive layer of events. There is not a steady stream of events in the space. So it’s not like the Japan pavillion where it’s chaotic and things are happening and it’s not like some other pavillions that have embraced or are still rooted in the discursive turn where the pavilion is where things happen. And so my title became deputy curator to better reflect the work I was doing.</div><div><br></div><div><b>How did the selection process for the artist work?</b></div><div><br></div><div>Every pavillion is different and the hierachy of who makes which choices are completely different from pavillion to pavillion. I didn’t select Tavares, in fact Tavares selected me. The artist happily enjoys working with friends and we’ve known each other a very long time and everyone on this team. Before he graduated with his MFA we have known one another and we did a show together in 2009 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, where I was curator at the time and that was a part of the project where he was launching rockets off the coast of Nassau using only Bahamian materials. Sand, sugar cane.</div><div><br></div><div><b>Can you talk about the contemplative component of the exhibition?</b></div><div><br></div><div>One of the major and connective threads throughout the artist’s pracice is this idea of what is visible and what is invisible and how they shift and how displacment and cultural and historical changes affect both. To realize what is there and what is not there takes a patience of vision for the viewer. Part of the artist’s project and part of the project of this installation is undoing common conceptions of what we think we know about history, narratives of history, what we know about representation. There are many layers to the work, for example, the narrative of Matthew Henson. </div><div><br></div><div>This theme of visibilty and invisibility and through the installation itself. Ironically, the erased figure of Henson is no more interesting to anyone visiting the pavillion or involved in the international art world than the original figure of conquest that he was associated with. At the same time I think that the work goes further and also is undoing what we immediately reach to as a kind of form of contemporary projects. Because if you look at the missions of institutions for example, many of them mention supporting underrecognized artists and underrecognized figures so this process of uncovering has now also become a kind of common form. </div><div><br></div><div>What I love about the artist’s practice is that it’s not merely about an external narrative but also about an internal narrative. Not only a kind of disclosure itself, an invitation of the viewer into this disruption and displacement. So when you walk in, neon signs which may be exploding or imploding telling you "I belong here, you belong here, we belong here" then you’re like where is here? Who am I? What is this kind of transnational space, is it really transnational? Who is involved who is left out?One of my favourite pieces in the exhibition is "40 days and 40 nights" which is the 40 Bahemmien children singing in the pavillion. One thing that I love about it in this space is that it’s two communities from across the globe north of this space and south of this space together speaking a language that we can understand.</div><div><br></div><div><b>Can you talk to us about your approach to history and curating?</b></div><div><br></div><div>That’s a really big question. I think curators have a responsibilty to critically look at history and not just to learn it in a profunctionary way. I’m about to finish my PhD in art history and I feel like maybe I begun to know something. Only begun though. Since the advent of the real professionalisation of curating and also the idea of curating as a career is a really hip and glamourous rockstar thing to do, this critical vision of history is kind of getting left aside and history for everyone is starting in the 80’s or something.</div><div><br></div><div>I’ve been looking at Tavares’s work for so long I started thinking about everything in the terms of the problem and the idea of firsts. Who did something first? This colonial rubric that we apply to these things. The idea that a topic is done but you’re always searching for the new thing, when new things are there to uncover everywhere. </div><div><br></div><div>I just finished working on an exhibition from recent history looking at an artist who’s work is really not very well known. An exhibition of (Brian Weil) who’s a New York based artist and died in 1996. He’s best known as an activist, he started New York’s first needle exchange program. The body of work he’s best known for are his large-scale photographs representing various aspects of the AIDS crisis, domestically and globally through portraits. The photographs are wonderful but a limited byproduct. It’s the same kind of thing in curating. The big question now is what is the role of the object and what’s the role of the history. Maybe that’s one answer.</div><div><br></div><div><b>Thank you.</b></div><div><br></div>Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-49676716938838306492013-08-15T23:34:00.000-04:002013-08-15T23:52:16.701-04:00Last Chance: El Anatsui at the Brooklyn Museum<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-2d1bef56-84eb-63e7-f79f-ed48761df4b7" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This week is your last chance to see El Anatsui’s monumental solo exhibition </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gravity and Grace</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> at the Brooklyn Museum. The </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">exhibition displays over 30 artworks, mostly in metal and wood. The work covers large parts of the museum’s floor, hang on the wall, stand in the room or act as a translucent fabric dividing the space by hanging from wires.</span></span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Early in his career his body of work - usually found objects - mostly consisted of wooden sculptures and wall pieces made out of used materials such as discarded mortars that he found in the streets of Nigeria where he lives. All of the object’s surfaces somehow reflect a history of use and human interaction.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of his first works in metal is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Peak Project (1999)</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, an installation made out of hundreds of tin can lids that have been assembled. Anatsui uses the lids of imported condensed milk cans from the Dutch brand </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Peak</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The work’s title not only references the manufacturer’s name but also the shape of the installation. It resembles the physical landmarks that trash generates and evokes questions about consumerism and globalism.
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DzUrDNTupn0/Ug2h4I6c6AI/AAAAAAAAKJ0/m2HQt2S7Y64/s1600/2013-08-02+16.57.27.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DzUrDNTupn0/Ug2h4I6c6AI/AAAAAAAAKJ0/m2HQt2S7Y64/s320/2013-08-02+16.57.27.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Peak Project (1999)</span></span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">El Anatsui is renowned for his works that consist of thousands of little aluminium liquor bottle tops that are stitched together to form giant cloths with copper wire. These works are very complex not only because they are extremely detailed, but also because they combine different aspects of painting, sculpture, installation and even the ready-made.</span></span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">The giant metal cloths become painterly compositions that however abandon paint and a flat surface developing into site-specific sculptures, while appearing and acting like a giant metal fabric. The liquor bottle top works also show references to Impressionism and Pointillism because each bottle top acts as a tiny paintbrush stroke.</span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anatsui’s metal works are playful and there is a dreamy and poetic component due to the warm colors and the shiny, glittery material that also associates a certain opulence. The wall hangings and especially the translucent curtain-like piece </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GLI (2010)</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that spans across the museum’s 72-foot rotunda appears like a rain of gold.
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">GLI (2010)
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Several documentary videos accompany the exhibition. They give insight into the artist’s work process and document the finding and purchase of used materials as well as the assembly of the single components of a work. It is a collaborative, studio-based process where up to forty assistants produce segments that are later shifted around by the artist until one big fluid metal cloth evolves. </span></span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Anatsui even encourages curators and collectors to rearrange the metal wall hangings each time they are installed. Thus, every time an artwork is exhibited it changes its shape and folds and becomes a site-specific installation.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Anatsui is a master of the non-fixed form, his works allow movement and mutability. Not surprisingly, he once stated,“Art is a reflection on life. Life isn’t something we can cut and fix. It’s always in a state of flux.” </span></span></div>
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-10871282812451477792013-05-07T16:59:00.004-04:002013-05-09T00:14:18.014-04:00Reto Pulfer at the Swiss Institute<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-53387ec0-8044-5b46-1276-dd1000c5c5bc"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">written by Nathalie Zwimpfer in New York</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The exhibition’s title, </span><span style="font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Zustandseffekte</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> can be interpreted or translated as effects of a given state. It seems like the room changes from solid to liquid until it almost vanishes.</span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The light falls through the skylight windows and becomes an important actor giving a site-specific component to the installation. It lightens up the tent from above and when it hits through the fabric it is softly distributed and floats through the room, creating a mysterious and sensual setting. The smell of incense sticks all over the exhibition space supports this ambience.</span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With large fabrics draping from the ceiling, hundreds of waves are formed on the sheets, evoking thoughts of floating water. One could assume being surrounded by water looking towards its wavy surface from far beyond. At the same time one could picture the sky up in the ceiling. On the egg shell-colored sheets there is a wide, diagonal stripe painted that leads from one corner to the other. It's in blue, green and yellow colors and spreads itself over the tent's ceiling like the Milky Way. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">The sheets are rather subtle despite the installation's size yet they have the power to turn the space into a completely different environment. Pulfer's installation surprises with the ambivalence between its gigantic, impressive appearance and its creation of a reticent, calm and cautious ambiance that leaves the viewer in an almost meditative state.</span></div>
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-54189884193299895102013-01-25T03:15:00.004-05:002013-01-25T03:15:53.877-05:00ART NOVA, ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2012<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">written by Nathalie Zwimpfer in Miami Beach</span></span><br />
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.5538253814447671" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">PROJECTESD</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gilda Mantilla & Raimond Chaves</span><br /><i><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">An Uncomfortable Eagerness</span></i><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Due to the diversity and complexity of the work shown, a gallery that stood out at the Art Nova section was ProjecteSD from Barcelona.</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They presented a project called </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">An Uncomfortable Eagerness</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by two collaborating Latin American artists Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves. The work consists of numerous drawings, video work, sound and slide projections. During a period of 9 months Mantilla and Chaves travelled to an Amazonian town in northern Peru, researching the region with frequent visits to two local libraries. One of them, the Library of the Center for Theological Studies of the Amazon was founded by a progressive Augustinian order that broke with the traditional scheme of evangelization and colonialism. The other one was the Library of the Research Institute of the Peruvian Amazon that had a rather technical approach in their holding.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mantilla and Chaves chose this specific region for their research because in recent times it has become the center of intense debates regarding the Amazonian identity. It’s a city where fundamental contemporary cultural and artistic movements have emerged.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Their work is concerned with the stranger’s perception of a place, his personal view and his eagerness to find out more. What are the stranger’s expectations, what does he want to find out and what will actually be found?</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mantilla and Chaves had to cross the impervious Amazonian jungle before getting access to the libraries, which was only possible by air or water. The density of the region reappears in the difficulties of researching. The artists had to work through a complex jungle of information, trying to gain knowledge about the unknown.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Questions are evoked about the relationship between the researcher and the region. How do we deal with information about history, how do we connect it with the present and is there such a thing like reality. There’s a very wide range of artworks all implemented in a different way. The artists’ style is hardly recognizable. And yet in this random way of research and artistic production a certain pattern can be made out. It speaks the language of history book and dicitionnaries, the pictures seem to be known.</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Maps have been redrawn, musical scores have been replayed and therefore a personal narrative has been created by the artists. It’s this personal narrative that leads back to the question about the stranger’s perception and the impossibility of understanding this complex world.</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></div>
Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-18214770719770446652012-12-07T00:10:00.001-05:002012-12-07T00:18:28.460-05:00Art Basel Miami Beach 2012<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">written by Peter Duhon and Nathalie Zwimpfer in Miami Beach</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Categorized by Art Basel as a platform for discovering new talent from across the globe, Art Positions delivers on that promise by presenting 16 artists spanning 10 countries. While in South Beach, Art Comments surveyed the works on display and we've short listed 5 of the artists for our readers to bookmark.</span><br />
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<b><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Latoya Ruby Frazier</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Recently participated in the Whitney Biennial 2012 with much acclaim. Represented here at Art Basel by the Parisian space, Galerie Michel Rein. Her work is at once personal and political, she doesn't hesitate to critique the ill effects of industrialism and its proponents, for example, Andrew Carnegie and his legacy. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Of the photographs on display, one series charts and documents the destructive course of a non-profit organization that is currently leading the charge in destroying community centers and hospitals in Pittsburgh, PA.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The documentation of erasure and displacement by Latoya Ruby Frazier continues her ongoing investigations and critique of capitalism that initially began with intimate, familial photographs.</span><br />
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<span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Latoya Ruby Frazier</span></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Aslı Çavuşoğlu</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Turkish artist Aslı Çavuşoğlu, represented by NON, a gallery based in Istanbul, is well known for her recent project Murder in Three Acts presented at Frieze London 2012. At Art Positions there are two separate work series exhibited in the booth. One of which that stood out is the Pawnbroker series that consists of 9 photograms that mostly show sets of jewelry.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Aslı Çavuşoğlu’s work is important because it deals with Turkey’s rather turbulent history and especially the Ottoman nostalgia that has been spread over the country in the last few years. However, Aslı Çavuşoğlu’s work does not only focus on the country’s history but also deals with research and it’s difficulties that evolve due to historical events.</span><br />
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<span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Aslı Çavuşoğlu</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #666666; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>Irene Kopelman</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Amsterdam based artist Irene Kopelman explores the relationship between art and research. In a previous project Kopelman has focused on sameness and difference in the context of zoology, more precisely in entomology. Her work deals with the difficulties of taxonomy and how complex phenomena are put in a tight system by simplification.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">At Art Positions Irene Kopelman is represented by the LABOR gallery. The exhibition consists of several watercolor paintings and one work made of numerous pieces of fired clay presented on the booth’s floor. The work shows the practice of the notion of scientific models through visual means.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Kopelman’s work has a big importance for the current, ongoing discourse of the relationship between art and science and how the methods of research in each field can be applied on one another.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Irene Kopelman</span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Leyla Cardenas</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Based in Bogotá and represented there by Casas Riegner, Leyla Cardenas engages with the remnants and artifacts of destruction, the seen and unseen, the visible and invisible. Her found object and sculpture on display, <i>Excision</i>, are an example of a process that mirrors that of an archeologist since she procures fragments such as walls, ceilings and floors to produce her work.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Her work embodies the failures of modernization, a reminder of the harsh realities produced by urban renewal and redevelopment in Bogotá but also globally.</span><br />
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<span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Leyla Cardenas</span></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Atsushi Kaga</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Japanese artist Atsushi Kaga is presented by Irish gallery Mother’s Tankstation at Art Positions. His paintings and drawings show different scenes involving cartoon-like characters he created. On all his work, cute-looking fluffy bunnies, bears and other amusing creatures discuss the frailties of human existence charged with cynicism and humor.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Kaga activates the booth by co-opting it as a production studio where visitors can see him and his mother working to create art, custom handbags branded with his fictional characters.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Visit Atsushi’s visually highly appealing website where each character receives it’s own space: http://www.atsushikaga.com/</span><br />
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<span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Atsushi Kaga</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>Art Basel Miami</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>December 5 - 9, 2012</i></span></div>
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-16069428289219602922012-12-03T14:34:00.000-05:002012-12-11T11:04:34.740-05:00Turner Prize 2012<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Paul Noble:
Turner Prize nominee and his drawings<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.294118);"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">written by Nathalie Zwimpfer in Basel, Switzerland</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;">The Turner Prize has often been criticized and various people and groups such as the Stuckists protest against Great Britain’s most famous art award every year. They are opposed to the Turner Prize’s focus on conceptual art since they would like it to concentrate on figurative painting. Turner Prize winning artists of the previous 10 years whose work are considered conceptual are Mark Leckey (2008), Mark Wallinger (2007), Tomma Abts (2006), Simon Starling (2005) and Jeremy Deller (2004). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;">Indeed calling the award after one of Great Britain’s most famous painters might not be a very suitable and fortunate choice of name, however, nominating artists that work with all different kinds of media and methods only references today’s diverse artis</span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;">t’s practice. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 17px;">Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain and chair of the jury doesn’t even want to the award to be representative. She states: <i>“The Turner Prize is neither a survey nor a barometer of what is happening in contemporary British art.” </i>In contrast, the Stuckist’s approach </span><span style="line-height: 17px;">is rather dogmatic. They claim: <i>“Artists who don’t paint aren’t artist.”</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Paul Noble</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;">This year’s nominees are Spartacus Chetwynd, Luke Fowler, Elisabeth Price and Paul Noble. None of the four nominees is a painter, however, one of them, British artist Paul Noble, employs a rather traditional technique for his art production. His work consists of large-scaled drawings and numerous small-sized marble sculptures which are now exhibited at the Tate Britain in London. Paul Noble has been nominated for his solo-exhibition <i>Welcome to Nobson </i>at Gagosian Gallery in London in 2011.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 17px;">Drawing remains the fastest way of accomplishing a visual expression and has always been an important part of visual arts. During the Renaissance drawing gained a special significance in the act of visual creation. Famous art historian Giorgio Vasari defined the term "disegno" - which is translated best by “drawing” - in his publication </span><i><span style="line-height: 17px;">Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times </span></i><span style="line-height: 17px;">in </span><span style="line-height: 17px;">1550</span><span style="line-height: 17px;">.</span><span style="line-height: 17px;"> However, “disegno” in Vasari’s sense is not only a "drawing“, but becomes an artistic inspiration and an intellectual concept, too. A divine means of creation and knowledge.</span><span style="line-height: 17px;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Paul Noble</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;">Although Vasari emphasizes the importance of drawing and sketching not only as an artistic method, but also as the essence of all artistic production, he doesn’t see them as autonomous pieces of art. In the course of art history drawings have hardly been valued as artworks themselves. They rather served as means to sketch a painting or sculpture. Only much later, in the 20th century, drawings became more appreciated and gained their autonomy as artworks.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;">It’s indisputable that Noble’s drawings are autonomous, self-consistent pieces of art. Not only their large-scaled size is impressive but also their density. Noble draws his fictional metropolis <i>Nobson Newtown</i> very precisely and the urban area is built up by hundreds of details. Even though Noble’s drawings follow rigorous constructional rules there’s this exceptional virtuosity in his use of ordinary, predominantly hard-mined pencils and all different shades. They especially reference Hieronymus Bosch’s perspective that makes space suddenly vanish. The drawing’s density reminds one of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s paintings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;">Vasari describes the “disegno” as the foundation of all paintings, sculptures and architecture. Noble eludes from this function of drawings. He states: <i>“There is no story or time in Nobson Newtown. I consider it to be a play without acts or actors.”</i><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Paul Noble</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; line-height: 17px;">Therefore one can argue that Noble’s drawings are rather conceptual than narrative or aesthetic. This is where things become interesting. Artworks cannot be categorized so easily. There’s a lot of potential in showing artworks of different media next to each other. That allows the development of the interplay between artworks on a meta-level. Seeing Paul Noble’s work at Tate Britain helps evoking questions about how different material, techniques and methods serve different concepts, ideas and creativity in general.</span></div>
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-10679763293315388602012-08-23T22:34:00.000-04:002012-08-24T19:33:14.256-04:00British Artist at Kunsthalle Basel<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Walking into the rooms of British artist Craigie Horsfield’s latest exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel is compelling. Surrounded by three monumental, large-scaled and dramatic pieces of tapestry and two frescoes, one could feel overwhelmed. The scale not only causes this feeling but also the historical connotations to these techniques, which are often associated with abundance and power. The exhibition is imposing and the rather magnificent halls of Kunsthalle reinforce this impression.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">On first sight the pieces of art can’t be distinguished between photography, fabric and painting. Even though based on film-stills, they are rather pictorial. Single colored yarn threads become an image. The materiality and surfaces play an important role in Horsfield’s artwork and the handcraft of the tapestries is astonishing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Craigie Horsfield, Slow Time and the Present</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Horsfield found a small weaver’s workshop in Flanders that developed a new technique to produce tapestries of this quality. Tapestries as well as frescoes are often associated with the Italian Renaissance. A time when the manufacture of tapestries and frescoes were costly, therefore only the church or rich and powerful families could commission them. Horsfield’s frescoes might even have similarities with Masaccio’s.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Although at first sight the tapestries’ motives seem to be from past centuries, this is not the case. All of them are based on film-stills Horsfield took in the last few years. Therefore a traditional handcraft is applied on contemporary motives such as rock concerts but also rituals that have been held for centuries. Two tapestries </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic;">The Arciconfraternity of Santa Monica, Chiesa SS. Annunziate, Sorrento, April 2010</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2012) and </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic;">Above the bay of Naples from Via Partenope, Naples, September 2008</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2012) and the fresco </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic;">Processione die Gigli, Via Cocozza, Nola, June 2008</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2012) show rituals that take place annually. However, the third tapestry </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic;">Broadway, 14th day, 18 minutes after dusk, New York, September 2001</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2012) displays an event that is the opposite of a traditional, annual event. A film-still of Ground Zero acts as a remaining evidence of a moment that changed history.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The second fresco </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic;">At 99 Posse concert, Via Gianturco, Naples. September 2008</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2012) is based on a film-still taken at a rock concert in Naples. Although a totally different context the fresco’s composition, perspective and motive is very similar to the one showing the procession in Nola. Many people are standing extremely close together, all looking at the same direction.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">There is a very strong interplay between the five artworks in the first and largest room. All the procession’s penitents and concert visitors on the first tapestry and on the two frescoes are facing the Ground Zero scene as well as a tapestry that shows fireworks and explosions in the bay of Naples; an image that is similar to a historical painting of a naval battle scene. The people on the frescoes and the Fraternity tapestry seem to be looking at those drastic scenes. The two tapestries’ dark petrol, blue and grey colors reinforce the threatening feeling evoked. These two artworks have many similarities with a picturesque Turner painting.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The largest tapestry </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic;">The Arciconfrate</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic;">rnity of Santa Monica, Chiesa SS. Annunziate. Sorrento, April 2010</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2012) shows a very old, catholic ritual that takes place annually in Sorrento, a town near Naples. In this scenery a large number of penitents prepare for a procession.</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The tapestry covers almost the whole wall so the beholder nearly becomes a part of the artwork. Looking at the picture is discomforting, the viewers find themselves surrounded by numerous people covered in white cloaks. The clothing looks much like the Ku Klux Klan’s cloaks. This association is leading to an intimidation. Only a very few participants aren’t hooded</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> and haven’t covered their faces yet, therefore it feels like an anonymous, ominous threat walking towards the beholder. By covering their faces and bodies with white clothes the penitents are losing their individuality and the Fraternity is acting like a common collective. Due to the tapestry’s size one feels like being among the penitents, however, the beholder doesn’t become a part of them. One acts more like an alien peeking into a hidden world to which one should not have access.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">In the second and much smaller room of the exhibition there are two tapestries called </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic;">Zoo, Oxford, January 1990</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2007) each showing a rhino. These two tapestries are very different in a way from the ones in the first room. With this diptych the story of two individuals is told. Both rhinos lie on straw with their legs bent under their bodies on the floor of their concrete boxes. They are lying there very quietly and seem rather exhausted, tired or sad. It’s an intimate atmosphere, however the scenery isn’t less dramatic than the ones in the first room of the exhibition.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The two tapestries are almost symmetrical to each other. The animals seem to be captured in the tapestries square. Questions about their relation are evoked. Are the rhinos lying in the same room and are they living with each other? Although they are facing each other it seems like there’s no dialogue developing between them. They are rather living next to each other instead of living with each other. There are two parallel stories happening at the same time and place, still they don’t cross. Rituals and traditions can’t be found on this diptych, however, there are strong historical connotations. These photographs are similar to first zoological photographs of the late 19</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: super;">th</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> century or even to Muybridge’s animal photographs. Additionally, images of rhinos always reference to Albrecht Dürer’s famous illustration. In this context Walton Ford’s triptych painting </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic;">Loss of the Lisbon Rhinoceros</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2008) should be mentioned as well. Like Horsfield, Ford deals with the notion of time and history’s perception.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Cragie Horsfield’s exhibition </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic;">Slow Time and the Present</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> is posited on the idea of the past being a part of the present. The linearity of history and its perception is questioned. The motives show traditions and rituals that have been practiced and developed over a long time as well as historical moments and individual stories. The exhibition mixed different perceptions of time and the relation of the past and the present.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Although some of the art pieces have been shown in previous exhibitions one could almost believe that this exhibition was site-specific. There are not only strong connections between each piece of art but also connections to the building and its surrounding.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Craigie Horsfield, Slow Time and the Present</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Before even entering the exhibition there is a newly renovated fresco </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic;">Das Erwachen der Kunst in der Renaissance</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> by Ernst Stückelberg from 1877 in the stairway of Kunsthalle. According to the assistant curator of the Craigie Horsfield show, the fresco’s recent renovation was one reason why Horsfield was chosen for the current exhibition.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Furthermore, Kunsthalle’s floor structure is similar to the church’s floor in</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic;"> The Arciconfraternity of Santa Monica, Chiesa SS. Annunziate. Sorrento, April 2010</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2012). Therefore, the large-scaled tapestry that almost touches the floor seems to fade to the actual floor of the exhibition. Additionally the size of the artworks matches the size of the exhibition halls. The connotation and significance of tapestries are related to the historical site of Kunsthalle. However, there is not only a site-specificity to the building but also to its surrounding. Looking out of the only window in the exhibition one can see Elisabethenkirche, one of Basel’s most important, historical churches. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">This show is recommended to everyone because it deals with the perception of time, which affects or even dictates all of our lives. Craigie Horsfield states about the exhibition: </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic;">“The title </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Slow Time and the Present</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic;"> concerns a sense of the duration of our attention and of life as something other than the busy and often frenetic onrush of everyday experience and our consequent separations from a consciously lived present. It concerns the notion of a present we may inhabit, a dilated or deep present.”</span></div>
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-70357866091847450282012-08-20T23:24:00.005-04:002012-08-20T23:24:57.204-04:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>Rey Akdogan, Light Wielder, MoMA PS1<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">written by Lindsay Zackeroff in New York</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">“9. To recognize light
as well as colour of metallic origin, and the discovery of beams as an
equivalent of the economic development of the town.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">“10. To relate the sun
as a bonfire of illumination to the system of our flesh and bone.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">--Kazimir Malevich, “Resolution >>A<< in Art”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Rey Akdogan currently has her works
on view at MoMA PS1 in one of their second floor project spaces entitled “off set”;
she was also featured in Miguel Abreu Gallery’s <i>“Surface Affect”</i> show.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Both shows use lighting gels, light sources,
metals and plastics as media; and she uses all of her media in their
entirety—each is displayed as a whole—thus situating her work somewhere between
ready-made/found object and sculpture. Using light as a solid medium, her show
meticulously highlights the nebulae of the spaces, whether it is her solo show
or a few works in a larger show.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">As a staff member at MoMA PS1, I
have spent over 20 hours in Rey Akdogan’s solo show.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Visitors, frequently rush through “off set”
unprepared to face the barriers to her space.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">At the entrance is a screen frame, folded to extend its triangularity
and hinged into some sort of dwelling for the silver streamer looped to one of
its poles.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">She rarely uses adhesive,
allowing her media to conjoin and intertwine through its natural
properties.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Yet the piece has the
corpses of unused electrical tape still tacked on.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The windows are blinded to eclipse the red
filters, the most striking piece in the show.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Over the course of the sun’s movement, the red and white glow
crystallizes into defined lines dawning in the corner of the room and moving
down a roll of glittery Mylar like a timekeeper or the hands of a clock,
metastable depending on the weather that day. Behind an electric blanket is
<i>Carousel #5</i>, a slide projection that exhausts all of material such as a plastic
bag or packing supplies into the light.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Similarly, at Miguel Abreu gallery,
her piece with the carpet and lighting gel, strategically hung near the floor
crunches the room into a pink line of light.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">All of her works, though relatively small compared to the other pieces
in the show by varying artists, have a massive effect on the space and the
viewer’s access to it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Her work addresses what is
installation and modalities of minimalism.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">It seems that Rey Akdogan’s installations are minimalistic, in that the
media appear relatively un-tampered and un-tinkered.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">This minimalism in geometry and reduction of
form paradoxically maximizes the material, introducing a chaotic tension—which
I would like to relate to Russian avant-garde and installation.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Ilya Kabakov, a prominent Russian
installation artist, refers to minimalism as an “inner equilibrium and focused
attention”, coercing the viewer to go “inside himself”</span><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8876004#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="text-indent: 0.5in;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[1]</span></span></span></a><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In the maximization of her material, she
invites the viewer to contemplate the material itself, as a whole, reduced to
its original and pure form a la Malevich’s <i>“Black Square”.</i> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Yet her core medium, light, is
inexhaustible.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--kybd2OdXgE/UDL_PFrDBDI/AAAAAAAAJRI/WMi9IOkcOuI/s1600/Carousel+%235+Rey+Akdogan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--kybd2OdXgE/UDL_PFrDBDI/AAAAAAAAJRI/WMi9IOkcOuI/s320/Carousel+%235+Rey+Akdogan.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Rey Akdogan, Carousel #5</i></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">As “Black Square” claims
to be the reduction of all form, in <i>Carousel #5</i>, this pairing of </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">reduction</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> and </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">all,</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> she diffracts and gathers her media as a high-powered
microscope and as a telescopic whole: an image + light. </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">This
projection motif is also the nucleus of the red filter on the window, where the
viewer gains access to the projection and the projector itself, in which the
projector bulb has harnessed the sun (and the post office outside PS1).</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The media is distilled from the film set or
theatre.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The privacy screen recalls the
fabric architecture of the movie screen, extracted from the peripherals of a
movie theatre, and replaced with what Roland Barthes refers to as “dancing
cones of light”, the projections.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">She wields
light as solid beams, using the movement of space and time to animate them,
recalling how Giuliana Bruno describes solid light films:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />“Thus draped in the luminous space
of the gallery installation, we are folded back into the animated surface of the
film screening, woven into the very architecture of the spectatorial experience
‘suited’ to the electric psychic fabric of cinema.”<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8876004#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title="">[2]</a><br /></span></span><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8876004#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""></a></span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Like the public movie theater, or recalling a Heideggerian
clearing<a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8876004#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[3]</span></span></span></a>
(<i>Lichtung</i>), that tear in the world
that the art-work creates, she has called us to her space to gather. Her installation is both aggressive and
serene, perhaps a bit like a temple.
Installation art is analogous to temples. We are all gathered in the museum supposed to
be looking at something, finding, feeling something, but we do not know what it
is we are looking at or feeling (if we did, we would not need what I call the
little white curatorial Viagra-texts, or reviews). The pleasure, which we pay admission for and give
our time, is the community of human and objects as sacred, and the
contemplation of this. James Turrell in
his work <i>“Meeting”</i>, a floor above in MoMA PS1, accomplishes an intravenous
architectural feat, providing benches for an audience, a congregation, to be
worshippers of light and sky. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The frequent haste to dismiss Rey
Akdogan’s work ignites the question of installation and interaction with
installation art—how do we reach the unconscious of the installation work,
which is relatively new, in the way we have been trained when we look at a painting?
When entering Rey Akdogan’s space, some viewers refuse this focus of attention
and reconciling with this minimalist and chaotic form.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">They look to the wall text for permission to
depart, with the supposed understanding of what it all “means”. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">What is this review other than more wall text?—my
viewing and re-viewing over the time I have given to her work. </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">I cannot make the critique of whether it is
“good art” or “bad art”.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">I evaluate my
opinion based on the success of the realization of intention.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The intent for this installation is not
articulated, nor does it need to be, but without it I cannot further express my
“critique” past my experience.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">It is an
experiential installation—a heightened, plateau of experience in no need of
this review I am writing, which is only an articulation of my gelling inside
the image. I recommend staying with Rey Akdogan’s work, re-viewing and
re-viewing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Rey Akdogan continues until September 17, </span>http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/354</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8876004#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[1]</span></span></span></a>
Boris Groys, David A. Ross, and Iwona Blazwick, <i>Ilya Kabakov</i>, London: Phaidon, 1998. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8876004#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[2]</span></span></span></a>
Giuliana Bruno, “On the Surface of Film and Architecture”, <i>Urban Images: Unruly Desires in Film and Architecture</i>, By Synne
Bull and Marit Paasche, Berlin: Sternberg, 2011. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8876004#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[3]</span></span></span></a>
Martin Heidegger, and David Farrell Krell, “On the Origin of the Work of Art”, <i>Basic Writings: Martin Heindegger</i>.
London: Routledge, 2010. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-26298746120414848042012-05-08T15:57:00.003-04:002012-05-08T15:59:25.869-04:00A Short Course on Resistance @MoMA PS1, May 13<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">PLEASE JOIN US FOR THE FIRST SESSION OF</span></div>
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<i style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: medium;">A <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Short</span> <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Course</span> <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">on</span> <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Resistance</span></span></i></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;">This participatory series is free and open to the general public, and we invite you to join us <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">on</span> </span><b><span style="color: #333333;">May 13</span></b><span style="color: #222222;"> for the first group discussion of </span></span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Simon Critchley's book </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Resistance</span>.</i><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">The book club segment of <i>A <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Short</span> <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Course</span> <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">on</span> <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Resistance</span></i> meets <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">on</span> consecutive Sundays at <span style="background-image: initial;">MoMA</span> <span style="background-image: initial;">PS1 from May until August to discuss several books, initiating with a discussion</span> of Simon Critchley's book </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://amzn.com/1844672964" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222;">Resistance</span></a></i><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Critchley, the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at The New School, joins the book club <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">on</span> <b>May 20</b> for a Q&A session.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Simon Critchley also serves as a member of the</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">International Necronautical Society, as Chief Philosopher. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Additional confirmed participating authors and books include Jorg Heiser, editor of </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Frieze</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> magazine; curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud; and philosopher </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Jacques Ranciere. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The book club will read their books, </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://amzn.com/1933128399" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">All of a Sudden: Things that Matter in Contemporary Art</a>,</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.sternberg-press.com/index.php?pageId=1224&bookId=119&l=en" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">The Radicant</a></i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, and </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><a href="http://amzn.com/0804719691" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation</a></i></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: bold;">, </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">respectively.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">Please join us <b>May 13</b> for our first session of <i>A <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Short</span> <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Course</span> <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">on</span> <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Resistance</span></i>, <b>Sunday 3:00 – 4:00 PM</b>.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">To sign up and to receive more information, please fill out the form here: <a href="http://bit.ly/IIczss" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/IIczss</a> or email us at <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="mailto:scr@artcomments.com" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">scr@artcomments.com</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><i>A <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Short</span> <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Course</span> <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">on</span> <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Resistance</span></i> is free and open to the public @ <a href="http://momaps1.org/calendar/view/351/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">MoMA PS1</a> facilitated by <a href="http://www.artbook.com/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">ArtBook</a>.</span></div>
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<b><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666;">Location:</span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><strong style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;">MoMA PS1</strong><br style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;" /><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 21px; text-align: left;">22-25 Jackson Ave. at the intersection of 46th Ave.</span><br style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;" /><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 21px; text-align: left;">Long Island City, NY 11101</span><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 21px; text-align: left;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: xx-small;"><i>A <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Short</span> <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Course</span> <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">on</span> <span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">Resistance</span> </i>is a multidisciplinary exhibition comprised of a book club, forthcoming lectures, and video screenings to be held at various venues curated by Peter Duhon, writer, educator, and director of the contemporary art blog, <a href="http://www.artcomments.com/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Art Comments</a>.</span></div>
</div>Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-76734314708337358772012-04-09T10:00:00.000-04:002012-04-09T10:00:06.292-04:00AC Exhibition Review<div id="dE_H" style=";width:100%; height:100%; ;"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'.Helvetica NeueUI'"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469);">Spectacle and Subversion at Ludlow 38</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469);"><br></span></div></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'.Helvetica NeueUI'"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469);">written by Jeffrey Grunthaner in New York</span></div></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'.Helvetica NeueUI'"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469);"><br></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469);">Much is to be said for art that is outright political; but perhaps much higher praise is due to works that refuse to side with any single ideology. Assuming that we exist in what Guy Debord calls “the society of the spectacle,” the recent show at 38 Ludlow, one and the other are another, posed a concerted challenge to the spectacle absorbing us. Utilizing historic icons and imagery against themselves, one and the other are another was an instance of art preserving a social-critical function, while dodging the all-too-obvious politicking that comes from reducing history's dialectic to some brand of “ism.” In the intimacy of a small venue no larger than two rooms, the works exhibited were stratagems of concepts and ideas, questioning the art-making process, its productions, and the historical circumstances wherein art exists as an available genre. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469);"><br></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469);">Comprising the work of five European artists, the exhibition demonstrated how conceptualism—an ever expanding artistic practice, rarely defined in clear and distinct terms—could go beyond the confines of doctrinal interpretations of existing social realities, and potentially give way to new avenues of experience, conceived as the correlate of a conceptualist aesthetic. Expressed in this way, it might seem as though the show concerned itself less with reality than with private interpretations of reality. The would be false, however; and much praise is due to the curation of Clara Meister for gathering artists whose work was distinguished by an utter transparency—not only in relation to the present world and its history, but in relation to the processes that conceived their work. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469);"><br></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469);">A critique of the specious opacity created through commodity exchange, where labor is dissolved into an ossified product, one and the other are another did not register as a “critique” in any obvious way. Rather, the spectacular existence of bourgeois culture was spoken to in overtones, which made criticism all the more effective. Hank Schmidt, for example, in his “<i>Collage</i>” series (2011), appropriated the characters from Charles Schultz's Peanuts comic and re-contextualized them via pictorial situations which exposed both their laughable innocence and their irrelevance. One work in the series figured several Peanuts characters wearing baseball gloves and standing below a house where a man was about to jump to his death. They scream (in German): “I got him! I got him!” Such works toy with mass culture as much as they critique its populist bias; and their ambiguous results situate them wholly in the world, honestly and without pretense. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469);"><br></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469);">A transcendental flare animated this exhibit, exceeding the confines of the known while yet remaining historically focused. Ignacio Uriarte's video work, “<i>Infinity</i>” (2010), was a horizontal 8, a mobius strip endlessly moving in topological space. The image served as a counterpoint to Antonio Hirche's seemingly minimalist paneling directly across from it: two door-sized panels, each a different shade of green. As one came to find out, however, the latter was not minimalist at all, but the studied abstraction of a German bridge unintentionally painted two different greens when Germany was split by the Berlin Wall. The proximity of the historic to the non-historical—one reduced to a bi-color essence, and the other fleshed out and given physical dimensionality—situated concretely as well as symbolically what conceptualism could accomplish both in art and life. One discovers a crepuscular zone between negation and the creative realization of a plan. The ethos of the concept can be abstraction from known percepts, and it can also be a vehicle toward new tangible realities. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469);"><br></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469);">The best works of the exhibit were those that utilized popular, even readily accessible media to expose systematic glitches in administration and privatization as we know them today. Jonathan Monk's great piece, “<i>some words of wisdom from Wittgenstein translated by google around the world from A through Z (with two mistakes)</i>” (2012) was pretty much exactly that: a conceptual recreation of truth becoming nonsense as it filtered through a labyrinth of administered space. The artist took Wittgenstein's famous quote: “What can be said at all, can be said clearly” (in its original German form) and ran it through Google translator, coming up with strangely illuminating mistranslations of the original statement (perhaps all the more illuminating to the extent that they indicate international communications on the political level). A single statement threading 68 printed pages of screen-shots, the meaning weirdly transmogrified as “pourquoi pas directement?” (Why not directly?) in French, and ended with the German (the same language as it began in) “Warum?” (Why?) Lastly, Pierre Bismuth's “The Jungle Book Project” (2002) was a densely brilliant piece of critical honesty poised against the society of the spectacle as we currently face it. Taking the well-known Walt Disney film for its vehicle, Bismuth's installation gave each character in the film a different language, insisting on the obvious: that the viewer would still be able to make sense of the movie, knowing the story so well. Whether this is true or not, “The Jungle Book Project” was a triumphal piece of conceptualism which made every stage of its finalized form visible, creating an intimate experience of openness, familiarity and comfort.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469);"><br></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469);">In such works, one wonders if we do not catch glimpse of what the world will be like when the mystification of our desire finally ends. </span></div><div style="font-size: 17px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); "><br></div></font><p></div>Pete Duhonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17600214558385205124noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876004.post-13362859992894557722012-03-10T15:01:00.030-05:002012-03-10T18:33:16.856-05:00Size Doesn't Matter...If You Know How to Work It: The Return of the Dealer<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; text-align: left; "><span><br /></span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span>New York Armory Show Review, 2012</span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span>written by Nikki Schiro, New York</span></div><div> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; margin-left: 0.75in; "><span style="font-size: 11pt; "><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size: 11pt; ">I have always considered my relationship to</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; "> the Armory show masochistically charged. And, like a beaten woman, I return every year, because I believe it is both my duty, and that it can change...<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; margin-left: 0.75in; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt; font-family:Arial"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial">Let me start off by saying I did see a change in Armory 2012.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; margin-left: 0.75in; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt; font-family:Arial"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial">I have never written about the Armory before. I always found it disappointing a bit desperate, and ultimately as an artist, spectator, and human being, depressing. I resent(ed) the overall lack of consideration or appreciation for the spectators (thousands of young artists, curators, collectors, and non-affiliated viewers/supporters of Art)—the non VIPs, lined up in cold weather, then charged too much money to be herded around crowded tight quarters to see unjustifiably glorified artwork piled up in small booths with bored, anti-social gallery representatives.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial">This year is different. The whole vibe of the place was different. Was it a little extra space? Was it less exhibitors? Economy? Was the art better? After a few hours of evaluating the surroundings, it occurred to me that the reason could have something to do with Art dealers taking back control over the situation. Ride with me on this one for a minute…<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial">I was introduced to Art Fairs (and the Art World) during the boom. The paradigm of selling art had already shifted to collectors calling shots; they had power and control. By the time I was in graduate school, (2003-2006), collectors came right to us (students) and bought out our studios. So, even artists catered to them. So, whatever gimmick or new trend collectors fancied, dealers and artists would produce, and that’s what the international art fairs were full of…full to the brim.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; "><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> </span><span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; ">This year, to me at least, the dealers had a voice. The Armory seemed to be kissed by a “Volta” fairy (just a little kiss), I actually enjoyed myself. The Dealers worked it.</span><span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; "> </span><span><span ><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Selection had integrity. Presentation consideration was apparent, and there were varying levels of curation-- from moderate to completely transforming the space. Ambach & Rice and Ronald Feldman both chose to exhibit only one artist, who transformed each space into a site-specific installation. Feldman’s entire space was overtaken, installation-style, by Leon Golub; who hung work at </span><span style="font-size: 15px;">strategic</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> points from the ceiling.</span></span></span></span></p> <a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jQWgyeW7EWw/T1u3qNOLcTI/AAAAAAAABLs/8WEHraOivVg/s1600/517.jpg" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; "><span><img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jQWgyeW7EWw/T1u3qNOLcTI/AAAAAAAABLs/8WEHraOivVg/s320/517.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718366087608496434" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 242px; " /></span></a></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; text-align: center; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-family: Arial; "><span>Ambach & Rice</span></span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; text-align: center; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; "><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; text-align: center; "><img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PUoa71FVYwM/T1u3qQSeR7I/AAAAAAAABL0/DJz1UZUviI4/s320/feldman.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718366088431814578" style="text-decoration: underline; display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 213px; " /></div><div style="text-align: center;font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span><span style="font-family: Arial; ">Leon Golub at </span><span style="font-family: Arial; ">Ronald Feldman</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial">Mary Ryan Gallery had hung captivating red wall full of works by May Stevens (below), figurative works on paper I liked very much.<o:p></o:p></span></p><span><span><span style="font-size: 100%; margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto;"><img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rFskexxrgUw/T1u2ePlvarI/AAAAAAAABLU/xmfKjsSYLxw/s320/820.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718364782574135986" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 213px; height: 320px; " /></span></span> </span><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; margin-left: 0.75in; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt; font-family:Arial"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial">As I walked in and around, looking at art and space, I also couldn’t help but notice the dealers fluttering around, socializing/selling, and generating a huge amount of excitement.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial">And, Excitement is like laughter…it’s infectious. When I talked to Leo Koenig, who seemed higher than life, I remembered my grandfather’s story of the inexplicable, unforgettable “high” he’d get after a sale.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; ">“We’re selling, we’re selling…they’re all sold”, he told me, as he looked over my head, simultaneously greeting the next couple coming in to the booth and acknowledging the person to his right. Koenig had one of the edgier booths in the fair. It hung, for the most part as a two-person show. A subtle quasi-conventional exterior covered with framed drawings by Nicole Eisenman (currently in the Whitney Biennial) and a 3-d bronze dog by Matelli, leading to a racy interior, particularly Tony Matelli’s new (emulated) “dusty” mirror pieces, with finger smudges, playing off an Eisenman beer-case-3-d wall piece. </span></span></p><span><span style="font-size: 100%; margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto;"><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CzhCyXEXpVo/T1u2dt6D32I/AAAAAAAABK8/ut4QSI719ew/s320/tony%2Bmatelli.jpeg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718364773532557154" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 214px; height: 320px; " /></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span>Example of New Work byTony Matelli</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;font-family:Arial">Apart from Matelli and Eisenman, one treasure corner, locked between two doorways held a couple of offbeat, unspectacularly modest black and white portrait photographs by one of the greatest painters alive, Gerhard Richter. Here edgy choices, reflective of the gallery, had heavy names to keep it safe. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;font-family:Arial">Around another bend, each of the several times I passed by, Jack Shainman sparkled in the center of crowds, effortlessly and unsuspectingly educating the incessantly shifting entourage about the artwork; like butter. You just got to respect people who are good at what they do. An El Anatusi on the outer entrance, while in the booth he’d interlaced large works by a few of his artists. My favorite was Hank Willis Thomas’ “Cotton Bowl” which I thought was sensationally latent with content and beautifully done. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span><span style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto;"><img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tKcCEdnh7mY/T1u2dwkETeI/AAAAAAAABLE/RYgl5fqKLr0/s320/720.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718364774245617122" style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; text-decoration: underline; display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 232px; " /><i style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small; text-align: center; "></i></span></span></p><div style="text-align: center;"><span><i style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small; text-align: center; "><i>Cotton Bowl</i></i></span></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial">They weren’t the only guys working hard and working well, the whole fair was oscillating. Storage areas were continuously being opened to reveal more artwork, while artwork on walls would every so often change.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial">If I was rich, and could buy one piece of art from this show, it would be the startling, visceral dripping prosthetic vagina/blood sausage photo by Cindy Sherman (who currently has an exhibition up at MoMa). Filthy. I stood with it for a moment to take it in and fantasize owning it, I noticed every person that passed it have an overtly physical and or verbal reaction to it. It was so magical to me that I forgot to photograph it (painful upon realization).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial">Obsessive, Labor-intensive works, that flirted between 2-d and 3-d , were trends this year, in both the Armory and Scope. In the Armory, two that come to mind are from Istanbul. Several portrait-type paintings made of layered pieces of mesh stood out at Pi Artworks and Ramazan Bayrakoglu’s airplane on panel (Below, top image), at Dirimart. Bayrakoglu’s is a labor intensive process beginning with laser-cutting plexi, then hand painting each piece of plexi with serigraphy ink, then piecing the image back together on panel.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YEbk5lIoY_E/T1u2eWY0i9I/AAAAAAAABLg/YmTlAB2Xuh4/s1600/721.jpg" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YEbk5lIoY_E/T1u2eWY0i9I/AAAAAAAABLg/YmTlAB2Xuh4/s320/721.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718364784398994386" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 213px; " /><br /><img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--6XI1Ltr0kQ/T1u9fBQbsUI/AAAAAAAABM4/DwzlLoCjt5s/s320/834.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718372492487930178" style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 239px; height: 320px; " /></span></a></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; "></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; text-align: center; "><span> <span style="font-family: Arial; ">Pi Artworks</span></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; "><span><br /></span></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; "><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tHRLfdJY1JM/T1vA896HD2I/AAAAAAAABNs/bhtL-KXQeHs/s320/hashimoto.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718376305519955810" style="text-decoration: underline; display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 213px; height: 320px; " /></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; text-align: center; "><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; "><span>Artwork by Jacob Hashimoto </span></span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; "> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial">Other trends I noticed were bugs (painted, sculptural), animals (taxidermy, bronzed, painted, etc), word Art, celebrity or celebrity artist as subject matter.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; ">I also found myself very attracted to mixed media sculpture. My favorite sculptural works came from Rina Baner Jee at Galerie Nathalie Obadia (B</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; ">elow, top image) and the sculptures lining the entrance of Galleria Continua’s booth, (Below, bottom image)</span> <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; ">by artist Pascale Marthine Tayou, titled "Poupées Pascale".</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; font-family: Georgia, serif; "><span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; "><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; font-family: Georgia, serif; "><span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; "><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; font-family: Georgia, serif; "><span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; "><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; "></p> <a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-M7TgpLjbX6A/T1u9e32SEtI/AAAAAAAABMw/iBsFwzQIvak/s1600/809.jpg" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; "><span><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-M7TgpLjbX6A/T1u9e32SEtI/AAAAAAAABMw/iBsFwzQIvak/s320/809.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718372489962328786" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 318px; " /></span></a><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; text-align: center; "><span style="font-family: Arial; "><span>Work by Rina Baner Jee</span></span></div><div style="font-size: 100%; font-family: Arial; text-align: center; "><span><br /></span></div><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-M7TgpLjbX6A/T1u9e32SEtI/AAAAAAAABMw/iBsFwzQIvak/s1600/809.jpg" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; "><span><img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vpqeWuPZSig/T1u9fYgmluI/AAAAAAAABNI/bOUqyyfxfa0/s320/703.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718372498729768674" style="text-align: right;display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 265px; " /></span></a></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; font-family: Georgia, serif; "></div><div style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia, serif; "><div style="font-size: 100%; text-align: center; "><span style="text-align: left; "><span>Sculpture by Pascale Marthine Tayou</span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; margin-left: 0.75in; "><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; ">Other Artwork that Stood Out:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; margin-left: 0.75in; "><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; "><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mLNcXMFm0_I/T1vA8ypC8OI/AAAAAAAABNg/4niZeG7OBHw/s1600/724.jpg" style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; "><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mLNcXMFm0_I/T1vA8ypC8OI/AAAAAAAABNg/4niZeG7OBHw/s320/724.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718376302495592674" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 283px; " /></a></span></p><div style="font-size: 100%; "><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: center;"><span><span style="font-family: Arial; ">Video/Animation at </span><span style="font-family: Arial; ">Cherry & Martin</span></span></p> <!--EndFragment--></div><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; text-align: center; "><span style="font-family: Arial; "><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0W78-Xcq1Yw/T1u3ssS4BLI/AAAAAAAABMc/NkIawm5XgiU/s1600/727.jpg" style="font-family: Times; text-align: left; "></a><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sZRc4nRiP-8/T1u3rtyDvAI/AAAAAAAABMQ/p_QCWMvbedk/s1600/830.jpg" style="font-family: Times; "><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sZRc4nRiP-8/T1u3rtyDvAI/AAAAAAAABMQ/p_QCWMvbedk/s320/830.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718366113528790018" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 213px; " /></a></span></p><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-family: Arial; "></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 100%; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-family: Arial; "><span>Angles gallery, </span><span>Tom LaDuke’s figurative/abstract paintings</span></span></p><p style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "></p><span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; font-family: Arial; "> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 11pt; "><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <!--EndFragment--></span><p style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0W78-Xcq1Yw/T1u3ssS4BLI/AAAAAAAABMc/NkIawm5XgiU/s1600/727.jpg"></a><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sZRc4nRiP-8/T1u3rtyDvAI/AAAAAAAABMQ/p_QCWMvbedk/s1600/830.jpg" style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; "></a></span></p><div style="font-size: 100%; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: center; "><span><div><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-c3UKtBO6-Bg/T1u3qorySuI/AAAAAAAABME/5pYyv0CF5CE/s1600/816.jpg" style="font-size: medium; text-align: left; font-family: Times; "><img src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-c3UKtBO6-Bg/T1u3qorySuI/AAAAAAAABME/5pYyv0CF5CE/s320/816.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718366094980434658" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 170px; " /></a><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:8.0pt">Artwork at Fredricks and Freiser</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:8.0pt"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PrvUWacuf60/T1vA9NF8gYI/AAAAAAAABN0/TMgO_oclBWg/s1600/504%2Bp.jpg" style="font-family: Times; text-align: left; font-size: medium; "><img src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PrvUWacuf60/T1vA9NF8gYI/AAAAAAAABN0/TMgO_oclBWg/s320/504%2Bp.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718376309596127618" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 213px; height: 320px; " /></a></span></p><div><span>Painting by Oda Jaune, at Daniel Templon</span><span style="font-size: 11px;"> </span></div> <!--EndFragment--></div><div style="font-size: 100%; "><br /></div></span></div><span><span style="font-size: 100%; "><div style="text-align: center;"><u><br /></u></div><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto; "><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0W78-Xcq1Yw/T1u3ssS4BLI/AAAAAAAABMc/NkIawm5XgiU/s320/727.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718366130309432498" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 213px; " /></span></span><span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Arial; text-align: center; "><div style="text-align: center; "><span>Futoshi Miyagi ‘s digital print’s Ai Kowada gallery were interesting, evoking the language of Chuck Close.</span></div></span></span><p style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial">I realize that art fairs throughout history, and forevermore will have their share of borderline soft-core-porn-art. This year was the year of pre-pubescent crotch. Mahomi Kunikata’s sculpture, at Kaikai Kiki was just impeccably made, it was just beautiful…but what did it mean exactly? Was it a toy for men? And there was another booth that comes to mind for attempting to sensationalize a blue monochromatic anime-inspired figure projecting yet another hairless vulva, by slightly shifting the easel away from the entrance…why not just get the curtain, and make it at least comical? Maybe they are modern-day Courbet Origin's of the World, and I’m being too hard on them…for in Art, there is taste, and to each his own. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial">Not the best I’ve ever seen, but certainly always nice to see work by Lisa Yuskavage. Other woman-name-brands I noticed were Barbara Kruger, at Spruth Magers and Francesca Woodman, at Robert Klein.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; margin-left: 0.75in; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt; font-family:Arial"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial">While most of the Art didn’t particularly move me, and plenty of it I didn’t care for at all, I can’t remember being marked by anything offensively bad, as in previous years. At first I thought that meant the Art was “better”. A counter-thought suggested perhaps Complacent Art is more like elevator music, and at least “Bad Art” makes you feel something. Optimistically, I reminded myself that artists (even great ones) don’t always manage to get all the parts together to make the magic, but because of the obvious efforts (all of these laborious processes, skillful and or fine finishing), I can imagine they intended to, which is at least more respectable than a poorly-made-one-liner. I’d probably have to go back and see it again to come to a proper conclusion, which isn’t going to happen, so you’ll have to discern for yourself.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; margin-left: 0.75in; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt; font-family:Arial"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial">I love change. And, I love seeing other people live their dream, doing what they love and always working hard to try and do it even better. As speculated after the crisis, things are changing…no doubt. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift. I see it in Artist peers, who have been joining forces with one another to make different things happen; becoming more detached from the “Art World”, and more in tune to the actual world, each other and their work. I saw it at the NY Fairs, this year; dealers have gotten their mojo back. It’s in motion people, and it’s electrifying. As for the Collectors, at the Armory they seemed to be happy hunters, just the same, which is encouraging. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 100%; "><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Arial"><span>Have fun this week, and for sure, don’t forget the small Fairs!</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <!--EndFragment--></div>Nikki Schirohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07781068840321064163noreply@blogger.com0