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Saturday, April 17, 2004

"Writing is migrating to the web"

 
You probably don't get up early on Saturday mornings. But if you do, I want to recommend Studio 360. It's on WHYY in Philadelphia from 7 am-8 am, but according to the show's website, it gets play throughout the country -- check the station listings button. Kurt Andersen, the host, has a different art world participant on each week, and he weaves news and background stories about art, music, theatre and literature around discussions with the weekly interviewee. Andersen's a good interviewer and the show's a good listen.

This morning, Andersen had critic Terry Teachout talking about criticism and about writing for newspapers (he writes for the Washington Post) and for his blog, about last night.

When asked about why he would bother to write a blog when he already had a great gig at a major newspaper, Teachout said "in arts criticism, I have no doubt writing is migrating to the web."

He was enthusiastic about being in the blogsphere and said, even though he doesn't make a pip's worth of money on it, he gets paid in emails, from readers around the world who write in sharing their point of view and enthusiasm about things.

"Most [blogs] are written by people I don't know," he said. "These are people making their reputation in the medium. You can start a blog, and if you're any good at it, you will be noticed."

Teachout, who writes about all the arts, from music to theatre to visual art, is a positivist. "The best criticism is enthusiastic," he said, explaining it was important to him to convey his passion about what he loved. He loves to discover new talent, for example, and is credited with discovering jazz singer Diana Krall.

The critic said he heard Krall first on cd then heard her perform live in a "dump in Philadelphia" and was instantly smitten by her "presence" in the songs and her talent. He was the first to write about her, and his piece put her on the map and changed her career. (If you haven't heard Krall and want more, you can hear her on the World Cafe, this Thursday, April 22, as David Dye interviews her and plays samples. World cafe is on WXPN in Philadelphia, but the show's website has other station listings )

Apart from the "dump" reference (what was that place anyway?), that's a nice sentiment -- to frame criticism as a hunt and gather that changes people's lives.
permanent link  roberta 9:34 AM
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Addendum to cri

 

As an afterthought, I'm adding a photo of Aissa Deebi and Yuval Shaul (see my previous post) whose work was all about identity. During the talk, there was discussion among Curator Osvaldo Romberg, Deebi and Shaul about which of the two artists looked Arab, which Jewish. Roberta, too, didn't know by looking which was which.

And of course, that was their point.

The man on the left is Shaul, and on the right is Deebi. Neither looks like the enemy to me.
permanent link  libby 8:46 AM
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Friday, April 16, 2004

Games people play

 

I'm not a fan of fortune telling, but I like the idea that people are always looking for signs and predictions...that we're trying to divine the subtext of life and our own part in it. (top image is "Your Fate" detail of a dice table)



We saw two omen-ous and sign-ful shows in New York, "Your Fate" by Allan McCollum and Matt Mullican at Christine Burgin and Barbara Kruger's new video work at Mary Boone in Chelsea.

And while the shows bore no physical resemblance to each other, they seemed to be focussed on many of the same things -- how signs get used in story-telling and the human proclivity to create subtext. Both shows are great in their own way and together they make a good pair, although you have to hurry because signs point to them closing April 24.

Your Fate
"Your Fate," a collaboration between McCollum and Mullican, is a fortune telling dice game that has Atlantic City-like trappings -- three felt-padded tables for throwing, a black velvet bag to hold the dice and a gallery attendant who acts as a kind of interpreter or reader or croupier. (image above is dice table and drawings of the signs represented on the dice)



But the dice, which sport symbols from daily life (like the universal male and female bathroom symbols) are so generic and open they can mean everything -- and nothing. And that's the point, I guess. As a predicter of the future, Your Fate is in your hands -- it's not in the signs.

Both artists, McCollum, 60, and Mullican, 53, have long made work that deals with symbols and signifiers. McCollum's website, which I recommend, is one of the best artist websites I've encountered, by the way.



Both artists use multiples in their work and this exhibit, which includes 100 sets of dice in addition to three sets of drawings, is no exception. (image of McCollum's Plaster Surrogate Paintings, right, and Mullican's imagery from a banner project, left).

By the way, Mullican had a solo show of his banners in 1987 at Moore College. And both Mullican and McCollum will be in the upcoming Big Nothing at the ICA. "Your Fate" would be a perfect piece for that show, a game signifying everything and nothing.

Because the work feeds on the viewer's need to know about themselves, the game seems apt for our navel-gazing, self-help-obsessed times. Your Fate is like a kind of viewer-participatory portraiture. Throw the dice and what you see is...you -- Narcissus looking down to see her reflection in the dice.

The artists must have had a lot of fun with this. (I know I did. That's me in the detail shot--I'm the red die bracketed by the big square in the circle die and the telephone die. I AM a big square and I do happen to own a telephone and/or communication device. So that's me for sure.

In the gallery notes, the artists explain they like the game aspect very much. Mullican says "My work has referred to games for over twenty years but this is the first game that I have helped to invent."

They also confess they are both interested in psychic phenomena and how that "plays into peoples' knowledge of the world."

I just liked the subversion of it all -- making a fortune teller that is not a fortune teller, yet giving the viewer the opportunity to process information about themselves and feed their ego. The whole enterprise felt a lot like the way news and information is delivered today -- quick, graphic chunks without a lot of significant analysis.

Your real world?


Speaking of news and information, Barbara Kruger's four-screen video projection takes aim at contemporary media. And, in a piece that's more entertaining than I remember Kruger's work being (mostly I think of her as a talk-truth-to-power artist albeit one with a sense of humor) the artist unmasks the unreality in some of those reality shows and questions the validity of news delivered in screen-crawling worms operating under perky, dimpled news readers telling often silly tales.

Kruger has always been about subliminal messaging. A lot of her earlier work was devoted to advertising and false messages about body and self-image. In a way, she's mining the same territory here, only in moving imagery and with theatrical dialog.



In several short vignettes scripted by the artist and acted by actors, talking heads are projected large in the dark space. A CNN-type "crawl" runs at the bottom, projecting a series of sentences that are the interior monologue of the speaker (who's usually saying something else). Occasionally the interior monologue is the same for all the participants, like it was for a catty segment involving high school girls and also one involving 20-something guys talking about cars. That was amusing. (three images from the vignette about art. "My taste is better than your taste," says one pompous art-speaker to himself, smirking)


The scenes take place around tables -- in a diner, a school cafeteria, a family dining room -- and the discussions range from high falutin' talk about art and photography in one case to emotional territory about relationships where jealousy and suspicion are spoken themes and hurt and anger are the subtext crawling along the bottom. Interior self image clashes with overt posture every step of the way.


In the family scene, mother, dad, sis and brother hurl barbs or chew in silence. Dad is reading the paper and says, importantly, that "This (meaniing the newspaper) is important. This is the world." Mom snaps back that "THIS (meaning the family) is the world."

Whatever. Kruger's "real world" soap operas don't so much speak truth to power, but they do whisper that image is fleeting, emotional undercurrents are stronger than you guess and sometimes people are not the best signifiers of their own true selves. (image is Kruger's "Your body is a battleground")

Read more about Kruger at PBS's Art 21 site.

Finally, it occurs to me that whereas Kruger previous stridency was a reflection of the advertising mentality she was railing against, here, parodying the cool media of television, she's adopted an insinuating, ingratiating and info-taining affect that is "real tv" if not "real world." It gets the point across.


permanent link  roberta 9:24 PM
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Cri de coeur

 

Roberta and I stopped at Slought Foundation today to talk to a Palestinian and an Israeli artist who not only talk to each other but collaborate to create art.

Aissa Deebi (the Palestinian, who now lives in Queens because he could no longer take the situation in his homeland, he said) and Yuval Shaul (the Israeli, who still lives in Tel Aviv) have a suite of manipulated photographs, called "Terror," showing at Slought. The photos are blurred images of seven faces (top image, and below right) merging features from the real faces of 28 people who died in the violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

The two artists met at an invitational show for Palestinian and Israeli artists in 2000 and immediately discovered they had so much to say to eachother, so they agreed to do some work together later on, said Deebi. "I met with Yuval after the new intifada started," he said. "It was shocking for both of us. We wanted to do something about the situation. ...Maybe it will help, but we don't believe really it will help."

The show has hung in a number of places, including Tel Aviv, Italy and Austria.

Deebi said their collaboration was the first instance of an Israeli and Palestinian working together to criticize the views of both sides in the conflict.

Shaul (Shaul's camel, shown left) said that in doing something together, they were hoping to get beyond sharing their mutual, parallel problems and find a way to get beyond the problems to a way to live.

Shaul, who has a wicked sense of humor, said their next project would be a monument in memory of the conflict--"ridiculous, in memory for the conflict," he said. I'm not sure if he meant the ridiculousness was because the conflict would be around forever or because the conflict was a heinous thing to commemorate.
The style would be a socialist-realist style that would reflect the influence of socialism and the Soviets on the Zionists and then on the Palestinians.

Deebi (Deebi's suburban guerrilla, shown right) added: "We thought it was interesting, taking the values the two societies adopt and create something ... cynical."

He opined the graphic images of civilian deaths that run in newspapers on both sides and that inspired "Terror." "Each newspaper announces ownership of victimhood." But a dead person might as well have no identity. "We are sharing this place in a ridiculous way: Die in it; don't live in it. ...Israelis and Palestinians are producing the same thing--dying people."

Slought Curator Osvaldo Romberg said the work resonated globally and historically. "It applies to any ethnic group." And it applies to ancient ethnic conflicts as well.

Shaul said ethnic identity lets "you immediately know how to think about someone. ...If there's a bomb, they arrest someone who looks like an Arab.

"It's very important to know your identity. What we did here, we mix all the faces." The Israelis who saw the show thought all the victims looked Israeli. The Palestinians thought the victims looked Palestinian.

Shaul retold another bit of political art from his oeuvre: He took three sentences from the Israeli national anthem and ran them, translated into Arabic, in "Haaretz," an Israeli newspaper. The words, about victory, sounded fascist. "People said, who wrote these sentences? You take something, you change the identity, and suddenly you don't know who did it."

Roberta and I both left feeling sad for the futility of all the earnestness and goodwill that ultimately has trouble reaching beyond and changing things. Romberg summed up at the beginning of the talk: "I believe in co-existence. That's why this show is here. ...I know it's pretty unrealistic ...especially this week."

"Terror" is one of four shows opening at Slought tomorrow evening. Also included is an interactive, computer-generated poetry project, Hans Haacke's "Condensation Cube" (shown above left), and a small group show to benefit Slought, with work from seven artists including William Anastasi, Osvaldo Romberg and Quentin Morris.
permanent link  libby 6:45 PM
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Thursday, April 15, 2004

Immaterial world

 


Before the rain nearly drowned our spirits in New York Tuesday, we hit two shows that were surprises to us--Brian Alfred at (shown, his "Endless City", acrylic on canvas, 72" x 144") Max Protetch and Thomas Demand at 303 Gallery.

Alfred was a surprise to me, but clearly not to the art world, since at the age of 28 this young artist was having his fourth solo show at Protetch, and his third in three years.

His dreamy landscapes start in the world we live in and get processed and translated via computer to iconic cyber-representations of the world--the world that Alfred lives in, I guess--that are dreamy and sad.



The work has an Alex Katz-like, reductive, billboard quality, without the people (shown, Katz's "Walk"). Somehow, Alfred comments on our society, but unlike Katz, he's not commenting on a specific social class or human interaction. Rather, he's commenting on THE SITUATION.

In large acrylic paintings, small collages (one shown here)and video (the sound accompanying the video was by musician Lullatone, CDs for sale at $5 each), Alfred's eye captures the irony in the billboards, the cool affect of the architectural spaces we inhabit, the processed landscapes of our lives. He focuses on the traces of the human endeavor with its creators and users all disappeared.

We're looking into the computer--and the painting and the video and the collages (another shown here)--and seeing reflections of our own minds. The dose of reality from nature is also processed until it reflects us, not what's really out there. Our infrastructure--roads, water pipes, telephone wires, skyscrapers, and computer wires have taken over.

His brief video, "Overload," with the techno-hum soundtrack, moves dreamily from scene to scene, with the reflection of a dirigible drifting across the mirrored face of a modern skyscraper, or an almost menacing number of highways looming overhead (shown below), or tall building silhouettes dreamily rising up from the bottom of the frame, then their windows lighting up and then the whole scene disappearing.



This is our so-called life.

I wanted to pop some money on one of the little collages (How much can they possibly cost? I asked myself). The answer exceeded $2,000. Alas. I didn't buy.

Secrets and lies

Alfred's beautiful, but sad little world talked directly to the next show we visited, Thomas Demand, a German artist whose work we had seen at the Carnegie International in 1999 in Pittsburgh.

Demand creates objects or spaces out of construction paper and then photographs them to question reality, photographic images, the eye. He's master of the big lie. It's hard to figure that what you're seeing in these gorgeous, giant photos is the real thing or not or worse or better.




The wow of the show was "Clearing" (above and details left and right), a chromagenic print of a recreation of a forest scene big enough--72 inches high, 195 wide--to walk in. The lit up tree trunks and leaves, some lit with green light, some with yellow, were believable at first glance and inviting and plain old beautiful.

The video, "Recorder," a film of an old eight-track tape recorder, its reels spinning, had music that had a similar, techno-hum to the music at Protetch. The shaking camera added to the old-fashioned technology's affect, and I had no idea it was a reconstruction until I moved further into the exhibit. In the still shown, however, the realism breaks apart a little.

"Lightbox," which showed the interior lightbulbs inside, was more believable and kept right on being believable, almost to the point of disbelief that it was an illusion. Only a crease in one of the lightbulbs and the flatness of the wires gave it away.

We saw only three photographs and a video at 303 Gallery, (the fourth photo, "Kitchen," a recreation from a photo of Saddam Hussein's hideaway, was inaccessible the day we were there), but they had me questioning reality by time I was done -- the glitzy gallery front windows, the weird entrance doors to boutiques, the weird anti-glitz of another gallery (shown, the entrance to Gasser & Grunert, where Bambi and the birds resided -- see Roberta's prior post).

And weirder yet, at the end of the day, once we were totally soaked, outside Whitebox Gallery, right in the brick wall was this video, "The Pallasades 05-01-01," by Beat Streuli, which had shown at Arcadia University's gallery last year. It was on display for only one day--the day Roberta and I were there in New York. And it was pretty gritty and real, kind of like the street we were standing on. And then again not.
permanent link  libby 12:35 PM
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Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Material world

 

Following up on Roberta's comments on Patricia Piccinini's sculptures at Robert Miller Gallery, her second body of work was transcendent surf-and-car-culture meets aboriginal totems (top). I suppose I should repeat at this point that she's Australian.

Wow. Her "Car Nuggets" are beauties.

The primitive sources suggested by their shapes drives straight into modernity with auto-paint finishes straight from the detailing shop, including marks inspired by classic flames and biker skulls. I wanted to take home a couple but would have needed to move out my dresser to make enough space.

Also at Miller were paintings by Yayoi Kusama (who, I just discovered today, was included in the "Group Zero" show at the ICA in 1964). Kusama was a '60s darling of the art and performance world who has had a recent comeback with her celestial dots and spots and networks (shown, "Nets Infinity").
Roberta and I saw a fabulous show of her gouaches at Princeton several years ago, and she's got a mind-bending starry installation, "Fireflies on the Water" (shown), all colored lights and mirrors, at the Whitney Biennial this year.

She's no spring chicken, born in 1929. Living in Tokyo since the 1970s in a clinic for the mentally ill (she committed herself), she continues making artwork that suggests infinite space with obsessive anti-grids. The pieces at Miller, dated 2004, are made with an irridescent paint that catches the light to shift the shapes and colors, depending on the perspective and the lighting (shown, "Infinity Nets" detail).

While both Piccinini and Kusama captured some spirituality with their shiny surfaces, Noh, Sang-Kyoon at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery was hit-and-miss.

Noh, who represented Korea at the 1999 Venice Bienale seems to have found a gimmick with his sequin-covered Buddhas and canvases. I went looking on Google for sequin history, and all I learned was the word sequin comes from a Turkish coin, so I'm unclear if this work is about East meets West or Liberace Zen or covering up religion in decoration or what. But mostly the end product didn't rise above the material, let alone transcend to anything spiritual.

If I saw the work as commentary on decoration, like Ann Craven's birds, that would make things a lot easier. But Noh's work suggests he's got higher aspirations. Some of his Buddhas are dressed in matte-black sequins, that absorb light like black holes and repel contemplation. No, decoration is not the subject.

For all that, my favorite was pretty decorative, a canvas of green sea creatures on a mother-of-pearl background, the transparency and wateriness captured nicely by the improbable material.
permanent link  libby 6:43 PM
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Birds that aren't birds

 
While we're on the subject of avians, we stopped in to see Ann Craven's ultra jumbo-sized budgie paintings at Klemens Gasser and Tanja Grunert and the first thing and last thing that came to mind was "Sex in the City." These sweeter than thou birds set before fuzzy backgrounds of sumptuous, candy colors and painted with brushy strokes where every feather is in place, every eyelash mascara'd and every claw nail polished evoke nothing as much as Carrie Bradshaw in her tutu and high heels. (top image is detail from "I'm sorry," 2004)

Fictional bird bon bons to make you feel good when you're blue. Fashion, comfort and prettiness are on the plate, other than that it's calorie- and content-free.


Libby brought up Lisa Yuskavage in our discussion, both for the kitsch-iness of the images and those oh too sweet colors. I think that's right. (image left is "Stepping out" detail)

There's also a silliness and a swooning sense of home decor and shopping. The scale alone, a kind of pumped-up, Versaille-like bigness, is a hoot, pardon the expression. (at their largest they are nine feet tall and six feet wide)

Alex Katz was the first reference that popped to mind when I saw "Dear" a painting of a large Bambi-like deer knee deep in a field of daisies (image is detail of "Dear"). Notice the come-hither look in the eyes. Katz is a painter of fashionable pictures. But at least he's got the human angle going.

These paintings, which I do not think "represent" birds as is suggested in some of the writing, do represent an infantalized idea of birds -- and an infantalized idea of painting -- lots of brushwork, nice colors, pleasing. Is it perhaps for an audience that eschews content in favor of style?


I believe there's a big nothing here that's being made much ado about in the critical writing, some of which was available in the gallery.

"Her heartfelt canvases, touched by an almost religious reverence for the planet's flora and fauna, are themselves products of an artificial, digitally enhanced reality," said Francine Koslow Miller in Artforum. Read more acclaim and positioning.


Now I think that quote could apply to Patricia Piccinini's work (see post below) or Brian Alfred's work (image is Alfred's painting of a flock in trees) about which you'll learn a lot more from Libby. But I don't buy it for Craven.

permanent link  roberta 5:33 PM
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Rainy day sunshine and other myths

 

We took the train as I said, and wouldn't you know, there was a delay. While stalled outside Elizabeth in the north Jersey bogs we had the opportunity to absorb the lay of the land beside the tracks -- stringy-looking trees, fences, tract housing and telephone polls.


It was the first forlorn moment in a day that had a lot of those. We saw much art that was either forlorn or fantastical (the antidote for forlorn?). Some pieces dipped so far into fantasy you wondered if the artists too had been moored in a bog and were looking for a way out.

Libby will tell you about some of what what we saw. Here's the beginning of my bit -- a few initial thoughts and some images.

Patricia Piccinini's sculptures at Robert Miller Gallery were of two types -- sci-fi Hollywood fantasy and car-culture fantasy. Either way, you get a lot of fantasy and a longing for a better world in her gorgeously-made pieces.



Piccinini's piece (detail, front and back) "Bodyguard (for golden helmeted honeyeater)" fascinated, repulsed and mesmerized. The sculpted creature, imagined and created by the artist is a facsimile of an animal that would protect an endangered bird from her home state of Victoria in Australia. It's a believable creature on one level -- the craftsmanship astonished -- and the little monkey could be right out of a Natural History museum. However, the whole scene is a complete fiction. The monkey sits on a leather-upholstered "tree." And in the corner is the endangered bird -- in a scene on a video monitor.


The bird goes backwards and forwards most unnaturally in the video loop which makes you wonder whether it, too, is a fiction. (It's not -- image shows birds released into the wild in Victoria after being bred in captivity. Read about the bird.) What is most real in the piece is the sense of longing for a better world, one in which genetics could be used to help us all out of the eco-mess we seem to be sinking into more and more.

Piccinini, an Australian artist who was Australia's representative at the last Venice Biennale, uses the same technical crew and assistants that Ron Mueck uses (he of the three-quarter size nude figure of his dad ("Dead Dad," image) that was in the "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2000). That explains the amazing craftsmanship, which exists in Mueck's work as well.


"Bodyguard" is part of the artist's series,"Nature's Little Helper," a wry title that implies child's mimicry of a parent. If humans are indeed Mother nature's little helpers we've got to grow up a little and take charge. Wishful thinking? An impossibility? The piece is escapism on the order of a Hollywood movie.

This is the artist's first solo show in America. I can't wait for the next one.


Alec Soth's photographs at Yossi Milo have forlorn as subject matter. Soth, whose approach is documentary tinged with a little Arbus and Mary Ellen Mark presents people and places as mood pieces -- archetypes that trigger reactions. Libby felt there was creep show in the work and I see how you can get that.

I think the photographer's got some empathy with these people. These are icons -- the aging girl sitting on a bed with Disney character bedspread; the mother and daughter look-alikes with their entwined legs (image); even the guy in jockey shorts with the Rotweiler between his legs -- but the level of intimacy with which they're captured shows their humanity and the photographer's as well. And what it communicates to me is that we're all a little off, in our own ways. Mark and Arbus did it before him, but Soth is mining a photo-tradition, the edgy, telling portrait that speaks about culture, identity, and vulnerability.

Scale is everything and Soth's works were small scale here compared to the mural sized photographs he has in the Biennial. The bigger ones had more oomph but these work well.

Piccinini's piece, which is a believable monkey sized critter, also works well. Any larger and it would have been too fantastical.
permanent link  roberta 9:00 AM
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Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Gone fishing

 
Libby and I are taking the train up to New York today to see some stuff. We may wander by the Barbara Kruger exhibit at Mary Boone. We'll report back later. Cheerio.
permanent link  roberta 7:05 AM
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Monday, April 12, 2004

Been there, done that, and happy to see it again

 

The Guardian has an article about little-known Belgian artist Raoul de Keyser now exhibiting at Whitechapel Gallery in London. (Is it just me or does the Guardian have fantastic art coverage -- newsy and analytical and just plain better than what I'm seeing in the NYT (my other major newspaper for art)?

Anyway, de Keyser's amazing paintings -- abstract on the verge of representing -- with creamy brushwork, muted colors and humanist concerns on the brain -- came to Philadelphia's Moore College in Nov. 2000, and I remember them -- and the artist -- well.

De Keyser, then 70, had an onstage discussion with newly-appointed Whitney Curator Larry Rinder, and what I remember is the artist's honesty about the work and his shy unassuming presence.

I can't find my PW review online because the archives don't go back that far but here's my artnet story about it (scroll down a bit). Also, Whitechapel Gallery has 10 images online. Some of those paintings were in Philadelphia.

I'm so glad to see the work again...it brightens up a gloomy Monday.
permanent link  roberta 8:26 AM
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Sunday, April 11, 2004

Manet resea-n

 
There's such a level of silliness to the Art Museum's insistence on Edouard Manet's obsession with the sea that it's hard to take some of the blather that goes with the show too seriously (You can also check out Roberta's post on her experience at Manet and the Sea).

Nonetheless, the show itself is worth taking seriously, mainly because the Manet's are gorgeously painted, with slurpy, calm brush strokes that put to shame so many of his contemporaries, with their agitation of paint and surface (shown left, Auguste Renoir's "Seascape"*).

I mean, how silly is it to include that "Still Life With Fish" of Manet, on the mere pretext that the fish and the oysters come from THE SEA. Duh. But what I did find instructive was the quote from Manet in the recording (I broke my rule of never listening to the recording, since I was there alone), explaining the importance of making the background just, well, background, and of painting the fish with a few strokes to suggest, not delineate, the scales.

Which brings me to the sea paintings, which to my eye were less about the sea than the boats, and less about the boats than about boats as metaphor--for humans, for life, for safety in the face of nature.

The sea is the face of nature, even when it's becalmed. The sea, in the late 1800s, and even today, is a world that humankind hasn't transformed with buildings, gardens, factories (see "The Port of Calais" at top) --although "The Steamboat, Seascape and Porpoises" (shown) seems to be troubled by the possibility that that steamboat, a black blot belching smoke, may indeed transform the sea's natural stronghold into another man-defiled kingdom. The beautiful sailing ship, closer in and painted with delight, the wind pressing air into the sails, stands in elegant contrast to the steamboat.

The interest in the boats is clear from the careful draughtsmanship and hard edges; the sea also serves as a metaphor in these paintings--for planet earth. This thought is especially clear in "Sailing Ships at Sea," with its curved horizon line. The sea painting is less about the way the sea looks as about a kind of background and milieu for the boats.

I don't think Manet was as interested in the sea, per se, but rather about man's place in the world and about men as social beings (shown, "The Folkestone Boat, Boulogne"**). I think the sea paintings reflect those interests more than they reflect an interest in the sea.

Which is not to say that the sea is not of any interest. This comment is just my way of putting balance back into what seemed to me a sort of curatorial desperation to justify the show.

And that's not to say that I think the show needs justifying. It's just to say that the curators must have thought so.

*from Art Institute of Chicago's Potter Palmer Collection
**from Philadelphia Museum of Art's Mr. & Mrs. Carroll S. Tyson Jr. Collection
permanent link  libby 6:38 PM
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Janson's oversight

 

Photographer Dawoud Bey mulls over the state of African American art in a white-dominated art world in this artnet article. It's a must-read if you're concerned about who is and who isn't written in to books like H.W. Janson's The History of Art -- and why.

Bey, who has a show at Gorney Bravin and Lee opening April 15, ruminates that African American artists whose subject matter lies outside racially stereotypical subjects -- say those who paint abstract paintings or make conceptually-driven work instead of racially-themed work -- are somehow relegated to places so far under the radar they might as well be ...invisible. It's not because of quality, he says but for reasons that have to do with whites' perceptions of blacks -- the coon show he calls it.

Bey cites Philadelphia artists Charles Burwell and Terry Adkins as two examples of undersung African American artists. I'll say. Burwell shows in town at Sande Webster gallery and he's often included in group shows at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, but if there's a group show of abstract painters in town he's not always included. (image is painting by Burwell)

Libby wrote about Burwell last May and again in Oct.
permanent link  roberta 5:57 PM
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Curious taste of two things to come

 

Cinque Hicks an artblog contributor who produces the blog bare and bitter sleep and the online art story round-up electric skin has a post about the Altoids Curiously Strong art collection currently on view in Austin, TX and coming July 10 to Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy (read more at PAFA's site).


For the last six years, Altoids has purchased art based on recommendations from a panel of artists and curators. Then they take the cutting edge art collection on the road. The 2004 selection panel included our town's Alex Baker, Curator of Contemporary Art at PAFA, and the show includes art by Philadelphian Paul Swenbeck, (image right, sorry I don't know the title) and former Philadelphian and Space 1026er Clare Rojas (top image is "untitled," 2002) as well as work a couple Whitney Biennial artists like Hernan Bas and Aida Ruilova. There are 23 works by 20 artists in the travelling exhibit.



And as you probably know, the Big Nothing -- a region-wide exhibition series aimed at provoking discussion about void-oid thoughts in contemporary art art -- opens in May at ICA (the prime mover) and just about everwhere else within a stone's throw of the city.

Today in a NY Times feature by Annette Grant, installation artist Ann Hamilton says her new huge and beautiful-sounding piece, "Corpus" at Mass MOCA is about nothing -- sort of.

Quoting from the article, "[Hamilton] sometimes calls "Corpus" the "big empty" and the "nothing" that is "something."

Somewhere in the article, Grant says the pink fabric on the windows doesn't change the color of the space but, look at these two images and ask yourself if that is possible.
permanent link  roberta 11:01 AM
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