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Friday, December 24, 2004

Wish list from artblog

 


Pews for Charles Burwell, Zoe Strauss, Terry Adkins, Liz Rywelski, Randall Sellers, Daniel Heyman, M. Ho (image from Rywelski's K-Mart photo series)

Most eagerly anticipated --Janet Cardiff at Eastern State Penitentiary

InLiquid becomes more computer-user friendly. Our carpal tunnel syndromes are screaming and we wish we could find what we’re looking for. We know it’s there somewhere.

Icebox--watch out Mass MOCA once this space gets a big grant to bring in some really big stuff

R.I.P. goth--enough already; it’s the 21st century. Stow your cauldrons now.

A revival of the African American Museum in Philadelphia’s formerly excellent art program

Greater Philadelphia 2005--Greater Philadelphia 2002 at Moore College was terrific group curating for a great group show of emerging artists. C’mon Philly, we need to do it again--in response to the upcoming reprise of Greater New York, due 2005 at P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center (image of work by Mark Shetabi, one of the artists included in the 2002 show)

less of that photo-collage gone wild--Photoshop has created a monster in murals and in the galleries. We're drowning in images.

to artblog’s stalking victims, We'll try not to stalk you anymore. We're sorry, Virgil Marti, Sarah McEneaney, Spector Gallery, Vox Populi and Elizabeth Peyton. Look out, next year's victims.
permanent link  libby and roberta 4:45 PM
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Best of 2004 and some disappointments

 
The best

local genius award--Terry Adkins (image right, from his show at Pageant)

Best indoor show by outdoor artist: David McShane at Artists House

Sexiest art talk: Ernesto Neto

Best night-time video lounge in town (too much glare during the day) at Vox Populi: best so far, Guy Ben-Ner with his lo-tech “Moby Dick” in the kitchen and backwards walking ostriches; best dirty video there, “Chirpy” (okay, so it wasn’t in the video lounge) by John Goras in the "Screwball" show; Sheena Macrea's layered version of "Dallas" reduced to its essentials.

most long overdue solo museum show--Sarah McEneaney at the ICA

Best stichery--Xiang Yang, a new local artist to keep in our sights (image left from his show at SPECTOR)

endless soap opera --Barnes

endless mini-soap opera--Isaiah Zagar’s garden

slide show rises to art and performance--Zoe Strauss

Special kudos for African art merch and Manet kitsch merch at the Philadelphia Museum of Art gift shop

best random list--Rodger Lapelle’s why do people buy art

most daring experiment by McArthur genius--Kara Walker at the Fabric Workshop and Museum to mixed results

best kept secret immigrant artist--Henry Bermudez (image right, "Viagio Rojo" shown at City Hall).

best ICA makeover--Pepon Osorio

inflammotory situation burns itself out--David Stephens’ cross burning for Slought Foundation



Most disappointing

demise of the Philadelphia Independent, the most stylish newspaper in town.

continued loss of favorite old murals--Sarah McEneaney’s old mural, David Guinn’s old mural near Bookbinder’s, and we still mourn Sidney Goodman’s shrunk-to-irrelevance “I contain multitudes,” proving that in art, size is everything

Philadelphia cuts the Office of Arts and Culture, meanwhile spending more than $100 million to clean up City Hall and then light it up all night.









permanent link  libby and roberta 4:23 PM
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artblog makes resolutions

 


...for 2005

No more First Friday reviews by the Monday after (sorreeeeee) (image is our front page on Jan. 3, 2004 with a First Friday review)

Roberta vows to do more left-handed mousing (can she save her right wrist?)

Libby vows to see more art (is it humanly possible?)

We will continue to review as many shows as we can, sometimes using thumbnails to help us keep up

We will find a good gossip columnist. We know you know something. Volunteer now.
permanent link  libby and roberta 7:15 AM
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Gallery trends 2004

 


...seen in Philadelphia


The Vacuum cleans up in cyberspace (image is the cyber gallery's home page)

Pageant follows SPECTOR on Bainbridge

Charles More is back (we think); Project Room is gone (we think); Carbon 14 is back (we think)

Esther Klein Gallery becomes a destination with some smart curating

Taller Puertorriqueno keeps getting better

City discovers New York-style networking- eg. city-wide Big Nothing festival programing by ICA; and gallery sideshows coordinated to museum or other gallery shows



permanent link  libby and roberta 6:45 AM
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Thursday, December 23, 2004

2004 trends of the season

 


You thought it was Christmas? Not on artblog. Here it's the season of lists. Here's the first one (sorry we're not going to link, but you can find many of these names in the list of artists to the left):

IN

Philly's art scene; it's smoooookin'

New young artists = new young collectors. SPECTOR gets props for spawning a group of new young collectors

pattern and decoration reemerges in 21st c. Heirs to Robert Kuschner--Kate Abercrombie, Samantha Simpson, Max Lawrence

in the same breath, Indian miniatures continue their comeback--Shahzia Sikander (coming to Fab in 2006); Ben Woodward, Sabeen Raja (image, detail of Raja's work at Gallery Joe)

abstract goes cyber -- eg. Amy Adams

reemergence of portraiture by young artists in 21st century--Anthony Palumbo; Max Lawrence; Becky Westcott

art about technology eg. Brian Alfred, Thomas Demand, Harun Farocki


auto art Patricia Piccinini, Samuel Yun, Eamon Ore-Giron (image, one of Piccinini's car nuggets at Robert Miller Gallery in New York)

death by resin--Max Lawrence, Joy Feasley, Alyson Shotz, Charles Hobbs

Pilchuck--everyone is going there

Sons of Pilchuck--everyone is coming back and making glass here

artblog in Art in America!


OUT

not much, except for:

body art

regionalism

permanent link  libby and roberta 11:47 AM
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Blinds, hoods and frosty jesus

 


There is no art page in PW this week alas. (It'll be back next week...they're rationing due to revenue issues). But there is art coverage in the paper. You just have to know where to look. In the listings under editors picks, you'll find my review of the Junto show. And in the a-list, my piece about David Stephens' Kontemporary Konflagration — cross burning — at Slought.

Here are a few more thoughts on both those shows. Stephens is not new to working with crosses. He showed a room full in Gallery Joe's vault in 2003. (actually it was 144 but it seemed like the room was full — there seemed no room to breathe for all the crosses) The artist, who has a formidable history in the Philadelphia art scene, having sat on many boards and at one point having worked as a funder (at the PA Council on the Arts — at the same time Kimberly Camp was there according to Slought's Aaron Levy)has pushed some of his crosses into what reminded me of 3-D cyber cad-drawings. (top image for example)




In several works attached to the walls the crosses seem to have crystalized into an accumulation (a crusade of crosses?) that defies gravity in a way that seems possible only in realms of animation. The crosses have a real world presence. They're nobbly and rough-hewn and painted an improbable purple. But their aggressive,twisting horizontality took my mind to religion in cyberspace and crusades on websites.

I'm not sure anyone mentioned this before (Libby wrote here and and here and Colette wrote here) but the 12 grey and 12 black boards on the wall that riff on words are made also by accumulations. (image left)

Here, slats of wood are coupled in a way that they slightly overlap -- like venetian blinds that keep light out. In this context, of course, they're blinds that keep other things out, like reason.



Libby asked me to mention something about Stephens KKK figure which she felt got slighted in all the bombast about burning. I loved the guy. First off, he is familiar like a low tech R2D2. Built from cloth and wood with a base that's like a two-tier cake on birds' legs, the figure tilts to one side with some kind of attitude. He's a hood. (image right)

Then, if you crouch down and peep through the eye holes (he has holes in the back of his head and in the front) you look straight through. He is completely empty, a vacuum, a void, a straw man. Or maybe not. What you see when peering through the holes is such a small view of the world that you see almost nothing. So, as a lens through which to view things, he's a myopia machine.

You can read more about Stephens' career of community service in the arts at Gallery Joe's website or at Slought's.

Stephens' visually-loaded, verbally playful works are amazing. Don't miss them.

One more thing about Slought before I leave it. Aaron Levy, the Director, told me he's preparing for the opening of his archive-based exhibit at the Penn Rare Books Library. Levy has been working for over a year (if memory serves) on a project that riffs on archives and beehives and has to do with ideas about how much archiving is too much archiving. (As a pack rat I can relate to that.)

I remember Levy's archive-archaeology project at Rosenbach Museum fondly as a weaving together of thought, material and of course theory. I can't wait to see (and I hope hear) this piece having to do with beeeeeez.

Outside the norm at Junto



Just a word and maybe a picture. The exhibit at Fleisher-Ollman is a good one. As with shows of outsider art, the works are so disparate they should fight amongst themselves. But also like a lot of outsider art, the pieces are full of that inward-sucking energy that comes from a singleminded focus that's a kind of disregard for the outer world and for the gaze of others.



Best for my eye and sensibility were Kate Norton's Beuysian wall of pelts (not shown) and W. Benjamin Smith's religion-fueled drawings and paintings.

I hardly knew whether to take Smith's works seriously and that's their charm. One work,(shown right) is called Four Horsement and its affect is so Leroy Nierman (artist of polo, golf, football, you name the sport -- all done in breathless stop action and candy colors) I had to laugh. But Smith signs his name across the work in a William Hawkins-esque fashion and makes the piece a complete and pretty puzzle.

And as if that's not enough, another work both Libby and I loved (shown,left) has an ochre-colored worm with gloppy green eyeglasses floating in a field of pasty pastel pthalo. Written in cursive on the work is the following: "Beautiful blue-eyed Baby Jesus Weeps within a Frosty landscape." It's not good advertising copy but it's great art.

For more, here's Libby's post or see my PW piece.

permanent link  roberta 8:04 AM
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Wednesday, December 22, 2004

And while we're bragging

 
Vox Populi sent a mass email bragging about member Charles Hobbs who got a plum critic's pick review in Artforum. The writer is William Pym, one of the curators of the "Junto" exhibit at Fleisher-Ollman gallery and a contributor to the soon to be former (boo hoo) Philadelphia Independent. Libby covered Hobbs in a recent post about the gallery's current show. And here's my write up on his debut show with Vox. Congrats, Charles!
permanent link  roberta 5:17 PM
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Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Bragging rights

 









Rob Matthews was the first to email us that artblog got a really nice write-up by Raphael Rubinstein in Art in America, page 25 of the new Jan. 2005 issue (with Dan Flavin's neon on the front).

I tried the Web site but got nowhere on clicking the "Frontpage" link, which is the section with the survey of top art blogs around. We're listed third, right after Modern Art Notes! We couldn't be prouder, so we're bragging (image is of the text).



permanent link  libby and roberta 8:39 PM
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Monday, December 20, 2004

True lies

 





Artist, sculptor, photographer. Truth teller. Liar. What to call Thomas Demand, the Munich-born artist, who spoke just over a month ago at the University of Pennsylvania, sponsored by Penn Design ?

Demand, whose work Roberta and I first saw at the 1999 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, and more recently, in the spring, at 303 Gallery in New York (see post) performs a neat trick--creating models based on accurate photographs--and then photographing the models.

Here are some of the things he said that I found interesting:

He tries to print his photos at the same size as the model that he built. In other words, the prints are nearly life-size.

Some of his photos are so big that they require multiple panels of gigantic photo paper.

"Space Simulator," (left), is a photo of a paper model of a training module that simulates an outer space experience for astronauts. It is so large, it took three panels of photo paper. (Most of the images in this post are not only shrunk down to nothing, which is a given, but they are photos taken of Demand's slide lecture, so the large photos are reduced to computer images then projected by him and rephotographed by me. I felt that, in the interest of truth, I needed to share this just in case it wasn't obvious.)

Demand's model was based on a photo in a NASA book (right)-- a 3-D model based on a 2-D representation of the original, which was something that simulated a real experience.

When he's done creating the photographs, Demand destroys the paper model. I couldn't help but wonder if, besides the practicality of saving space, he's destroying the truth about his lie.

In a model he made of an airport departure gate with its conveyer belt for examining carry-on luggage, Demand said he was interested in making something that everyone is familiar with to the point of never even thinking of it as worthy of being in an art work. "The Gate" (left) is a generic pass-through, with no people and no trace of use. "Photos mediate our experiences," said Demand.



"The Kitchen" (right) is a recreation of Saddam Hussein's hide-out kitchen, as photographed by a soldier and printed in newspapers around the world. Press photographers, said Demand, have been replaced by people who are involved in an event taking their own pictures. In "Clearing," a sylvan scene (top image) made with 280,000 leaves cut out of paper, Demand captures a romantic moment, except in this one, he allows the facture to show.

Demand also uses video in his plays on reality.

"Spinning Plates," a 52-second reconstruction of a famous Lumiere Brothers film, loops 3 seconds of plates spinning so they seem to spin for a surprising length of time. Only common sense recognizes the lie, not your eyes. "Recorder" (left video still) records what appears to be an old eight-track tape recorder, its reels appearing to spin music. But Demand made the so-called tape recorder out of paper, and he sampled and looped the music from a Beach Boys recording to create a techno music sound that appears to come from the non-tape recorder.

Some of his work has a dark side. In "Tunnel" (right video stills) his animation is of the tunnel in which Lady Diana died, selected because it's one of the "things we all know about, but not via first-hand experience." Demand rebuilt the tunnel and you know you've seen it before, just like you knew you had seen the airport gate. I had to leave early, but Roberta stayed the course, and mentioned to me that he also made a piece based on press photos of the hallway where serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer lived.

Demand was also inspired by the tv set built for a press conference for when the Berlin Wall came down. He thought it looked like a Renaissance picture, but then he wanted it to be less political, more generic, so he went to a popular, 40-years in duration tv quiz show, "Was bin ich?," or Who am I? for his piece, "Studio."

He digressed here and went into his fascination with the Florida vote recount in 2000. He was intrigued by people counting pieces of paper. "It was all about paper," he said. "It was also an event which will not go away."

A few other subjects he further fictionalized--Jackson Pollack's studio, based on a photo in Life Magazine; "Lawn" (left) thoroughly banal and created with hand-cut pieces of grass; the post office in the village where he grew up, with its Bauhaus detail; a changing room, which, without people, made me think of Nazi concentration camps; an airplane on the tarmac, based on standard news photograph of someone arriving and disembarking, but no people are in Demand's recreation. Think of Gerald Ford tumbling out of Air Force One, and then erase him and everyone else.

In a November New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell wrote on photography's failed promise to tell the truth vis a vis surveillance and mammograms (article here).
The more time we spend on mediated images, the less we can trust our "knowledge" partially because our expectations of accuracy and technological perfection are out of line. This theme came across loud and clear in the most recent Carnegie International, especially in the installations by Harun Farocki (see post), but also in the work of Kutlug Ataman and Paul Chan.

But even if you get off your computer, put away your digital camera, get your nose away from the newspaper and the tv screen and have a direct experience, there's no guarantee that you'll get it right. I'm thinking here of the refs at the football game who refer to the video playbacks, sometimes, to clarify what happened.

There's no getting around the fact that clarity and truth are not a given.
permanent link  libby 3:28 PM
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Virgil tells all

 
Introduction to today's Inliquid newsletter:

“What good is it being in the [Whitney] Biennial if you don’t get to meet Brad Pitt?” –Virgil Marti, quoted in W Magazine

Just in case you haven't signed up for the inliquid newsletter or, like so many others, you tried to sign up and failed, I was sure you would want to know this.
permanent link  libby 1:15 PM
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Kerry James Marshall in Harlem

 
The Friday New York Times ran a review of Kerry James Marshall's solo show at the Studio Museum in Harlem (try our NY Times user id: lrrfartblog, password: artblog).

While the review is mixed as are Marshall's media, the work that first drew me to this work--the big narrative paintings--got kudos. I plan to get there come hell or high water or below zero temperatures.
permanent link  libby 11:54 AM
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