Entries Tagged as 'Artists'

Styrofoam at the RISD Museum

March 21st, 2008 · 2 Comments · Artists, Providence

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Folkert de Jong, Mount Maslow, 2007, (detail), styrofoam, polyurethane foam and pigment, [source]

Any exhibition where the organizing factor is as straightforward as material runs the risk of reading like a treatise on variation and the artists’ ingenuity of the material’s exploited uses. With a material as ubiquitous and malleable as styrofoam, the title and basis of RISD museum’s current exhibition, the risk of catalogued variation seems a pitfall hard to avoid.

Yet, in this quirky show, the stuff the artwork is made of stays in the background, allowing the works to speak to one another in surprising ways by using the properties of the material as a point of conversation.

Richard Tuttle’s carved arrowhead-shaped works play at the crossroads of high / low art and old / new technology. B. Wurtz’s photographs of the contours of packing material are a humorous take on modern landscape. Heide Fasnacht’s Exploding Plane, which hovers in the airspace above the other works, though made in 2000, draws the conversation into a possible political commentary on exploited natural resources and the lead-up to the terror attacks of 2001.

It is Folkert de Jong’s dancing figures that inspired curator Judith Tannenbaum to originally propose the exhibition. Carved into kilted totems of leprechaun-like hilarity, these creatures pose defiantly under the deadly plane, just, you know, keepin’ it light.

Styrofoam
RISD Museum
March 14-July 20, 2008

Lauren Bon at Ace

March 17th, 2008 · No Comments · Artists, Los Angeles

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Lauren Bon, Bees and Meat, 2007

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Lauren Bon, Bees and Meat, 2007

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Lauren Bon, Bees and Meat, 2007

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Lauren Bon, Bees and Meat, 2007

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Lauren Bon, Bees and Meat, 2007

On view through March 2008 at Ace Gallery in Los Angeles, Lauren Bon’s Bees and Meat should not be missed. Lauren Bon is the artist behind Not a Cornfield, a large installation of an actual cornfield in downtown LA. Bees and Meat is her first body of new work since Cornfield. We got a chance to hear Lauren Bon speak and love her playful (and at times spooky) pursuits.

Barry Anderson at Roger Williams University

March 16th, 2008 · No Comments · Artists, Providence

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Barryvideoblog

I’m curating a outdoor video space on the campus of Roger Williams University that is now featuring Vertical Blinds (2) (2007) from Kansas City artist Barry Anderson. Vertical Blinds (2) employs animated strips of people’s faces. The strips are animated separately creating a space in which faces appear and disappear.

The outdoor screen is active Monday through Thursday from 7pm to 1am. Vertical Blinds (2) closes March 21.

Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA

March 12th, 2008 · No Comments · Artists, Los Angeles

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Urban Light, 2005, Chris Burden

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Tulips, 1995-2004, Jeff Koons

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Firetruck, 1993, Charles Ray

The L.A. County Museum of Art used to be a hard nut to crack: a huge complex of windowless concrete where the front entrance was never clearly defined and the hodgepodge of its various buildings had no clear order. Although I’ve been to the museum countless times, I never once have had the sense that I’d gotten a comprehensive overview of everything that’s there.

Now that the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum is open on LACMA’s sprawling campus (is it considered part of LACMA itself? I’m unclear on that), I was curious to see how the Renzo Piano building full of Eli Broad’s consistently cheerful and LA-centric loaner collection might change the experience of the museum as a whole. And, well, now it’s definitely clear what is considered the main entrance. Chris Burden’s light-posts, Charles Ray’s great riff on the old Ruscha’s LACMA-is-burning gag, and the first of the many, many Koons pieces that dominate Broad’s collection surround a portico with the ticket counter that is now sandwiched between the old museum and the new.

As far as the rest of LACMA goes, I’m concerned that it will be a challenge to get patrons back over to the main campus now that a firetruck and shiny tulips point the way to Piano’s gigantic escalator to the third floor of Broad’s flashy storage house.

And it is most definitely Mr. Broad’s museum: each floor is stamped with a gaudy glass plaque near the elevator featuring a stock photo of the Mr. and Mrs. and a carefully worded explanation of the tenuous state of the collections’ ownership. Reading between the lines, even with no background information (like one person in our party), it is easy to parse out the institutional tug-of-war between Broad and the museums of Los Angeles in that paragraph of text.

There are some odd features of this museum: it’s a top-down affair, with the escalator ferrying patrons to the third floor and straight into an altar to Jeff Koons. The over-sized elevator, which descends through Barbara Kruger text, has a hastily added bar that cordons off the majority of the floor space, because it can’t handle the weight if as many people as will fit in the elevator all pile in together. The first floor is poorly lit and just a couple of Serras, and by the time you’ve reached the bottom, it’s about as anti-climatic as Richard Serra could possibly get.

But the collection, of course, is the art equivalent of walking through the pages of the Oscar issue of People magazine: it’s an all-star extravaganza and everything is dressed up to its show-stopping best. Basketballs? Check. Michael Jackson and Chimp? Check. Silver Mozart? Cindy’s circus? Hirst’s butterflies? Check, check, check. It’s all there, flooded in the natural sunlight that made California an artist’s haven in the first place.

I guess I’d have to say in that somehow it all works: like some twisted strange starry-eyed soap-opera befitting Hollywood.

Good Choice

January 25th, 2008 · No Comments · Artists

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Bruce Nauman, Self-Portrait as a Fountain, 1966, C-type print [source]

Bruce Nauman is going to represent the United States in the 2009 Venice Biennale.

Tino Sehgal at Marian Goodman

January 15th, 2008 · No Comments · Artists, New York City

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Tino Sehgal at Frieze Art Fair, 2004 [source]

It’s not often that performance art surprises and challenges my assumptions. Call it an unfair bias from a former performance artist who has given up the medium in favor of video, a decision that was many years and conversations in the making.

The state of performance in the 21st century is lukewarm at best, rife with reheated investigations of body, gender and otherness: conversations that were so elegantly explored in the heyday of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Even performance artists like Chris Burden and Vito Acconci have moved on to more diverse pursuits, like bridge-building and utopian architecture.

It’s a daunting challenge to make live performance relevant in this commercial, object-oriented art world, and yet: there is Tino Sehgal, at a 57th street blue-chip gallery, with no props, installation or costumes, breathing new life into the genre. Sehgal’s performance work, This situation, like the best conceptual art, is held up on the ephemeral scaffold of a simple good idea, well executed.

In short, six “players” working in 4-hour shifts, gather in a gallery to engage in conversation. As viewers enter the room, the players greet them with the musical drone “….welcome… to this… situation,” and then change the subject of conversation. There is a choreographed formula of tai chi-like movement that shifts the players around the room, and each new conversation begins with one of the players reciting a challenging quote that, during the time we were in the gallery, ranged wildly from philosophy to economics to personal phobias.

Here’s what is different about this piece: the performers themselves are empowered to create fresh content, but under heavy artistic direction; audience interaction is accepted but unnecessary; and the performers are equipped with enough formula to keep the piece on-track regardless of any unknown variables.

Unlike the “happenings” of yesteryear, where the audience itself was often the performance and anything they might do unawares might become the artwork’s content, Sehgal’s elegant and utterly postmodern work has both the precision and the agility to modify meaning based on the specific slice of conversation that the viewer happens to interrupt. This situation speaks to the contemporary zeitgeist with such persuasion that it might, in fact, make great strides towards reinvigorating that old medium of live performance.

Tino Sehgal
Marian Goodman Gallery
30 November 2007 – 10 January 2008

Damien Hirst at The Lever House Art Collection

January 13th, 2008 · 2 Comments · Artists, New York City

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It never fails: the first thing I think when I see a Damien Hirst is — sheesh, that’s a big budget. The scale of his work is mind-boggling, and the commission he made for The Lever House, School: The Archeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge, boasts that swagger that’s made him a superstar.

The installation is a “school room” of glass tanks full of sheep carcasses attached to hospital hoses with a single shark and some live canaries among them. Leading the “class” is a large tank containing two sides of beef, an umbrella, birdcage and an armchair — direct references to the Francis Bacon and Rene Magritte paintings below.

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Rene Magritte, The Healer, 1936 and Francis Bacon, Head Surrounded by Sides of Beef (Study After Velasquez), 1954

Damien Hirst’s School… has more conceptual density than some of his other work, and this is not a good thing. There is so much going on — rows of dead sheep, live birds, an operating room’s worth of medical equipment, ashtrays under every object, clocks running backwards, stacks of sand, a paragraph-like title — that his poetry becomes belabored.

The two works Hirst references have no need for spelled-out exegesis. Those great painters both allow their subjects to breathe, to have some wiggle room, and to ultimately work out their concepts in a sensitive, interior dialogue in which only the most interested viewers might engage. If only Hirst could have learned that same lesson under their tutelage.

Damien Hirst
School: The Archeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and The Search for Knowledge
Lever House Art Collection, New York
November 12, 2007 – February 9, 2008

Laura Owens and the Sculpture Garden at the Dallas Museum of Art

December 30th, 2007 · 2 Comments · Artists, Texas

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Laura Owens, Untitled, 2004

A week in Dallas means trips to as many of the splendid area museums as we can talk our patient family members into accompanying us, starting, naturally, with the Dallas Museum of Art. Fault the DMA if you will for succumbing to the King Tut cash cow, but the Dallas institution will always have my heart: it’s my hometown museum and the first place I fell in love with art. And what fun to see one of my favorite LA painters, Laura Owens, (one of Christopher Knight’s “top 45 LA painters under 45”), now part of its permanent collection.

We also saw a surprising exhibition of Indian painting that kept us under its spell for far longer than we had planned. Chock full of narrative works that had much in common with contemporary graphic novels. Also, the Phil Collins three-part video installation, the world won’t listen, part of the DMA’s Concentrations series is slapstick funny and sad and profound all at once.

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Ellsworth Kelly, Untitled, 1982-1983

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Mark Handforth, Dallas Snake, 2007

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Zaha Hadid, Bench, designed 2003, executed 2006

Of course, you can’t go to the museum without spending time in its gorgeous sculpture garden. When it’s 67 degrees a few days before Christmas, there’s not much better than taking in an Ellsworth Kelly from a Zaha Hadid bench in the bright winter sun.

Domains of Wonder: Selected Masterworks of Indian Painting
November 18, 2007–January 27, 2008

Phil Collins: the world won’t listen
November 9, 2007–March 23, 2008

And here’s an excellent interview with LA painter Laura Owens.

Donnie Darko (2001)

December 27th, 2007 · 2 Comments · Artists

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[source]

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[source]

Donnie: Why do you wear that stupid rabbit suit?
Frank: Why do you wear that stupid man suit?

Donnie Darko is number 73 on my [work-in-progress] Favorite Films List. It’s darkly mysterious but not horror–think Time Bandits (1981).

Last night we watched the newly released limited edition with extra scenes with director commentary (on the extra scenes only). This is a must-see for Darko fans. The director, Richard Kelly, lowers his cards enough to reveal exactly what this extremely enigmatic film was designed to symbolize.

Although this might come as a shock, it turns out that Donnie Darko’s medication is actually only placebo sugar pills–so, apparently, all of the surreal events are not merely in his head. A second key note: Kelly thinks of Frank the rabbit as “divine intervention.” Kelly explains in the notes that he wanted the film to “leave room for interpretation” so most, if not all, conversations about God were removed in the final edit.

The only remaining divine intervention clues in the movie are subtle: the movie Donnie leaves to burn the child pornographer’s house down is The Last Temptation of Christ.

Unmonumental at the New Museum

December 17th, 2007 · No Comments · Artists, New York City

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New Museum of Contemporary Art [source]

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Kristen Morgin, Lion, 2006 [source]

The New Museum of Contemporary Art’s new building and location opened a couple weeks ago in NYC and I’ve been looking forward to seeing it and their inaugural exhibition, Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, which runs until March 23, 2008.

My expectations were high: with a four word, to-the-point mission statement–new art, new ideas–and an mysterious exterior designed by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA [with Gensler, New York, serving as Executive Architect], I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. However, as is the case just about every time I enter an experience with high expectations, I was disappointed with both their new building and their first exhibition.

What’s impossible to ignore about the building is that it’s designed for one person to use at a time. Stairwells–which are unavoidable due to the sole elevator’s small size and slow speed–and hallways are only wide enough for one person. Museum visitors awkwardly negotiate paths with each other while grumbling. On top of that, the details betray a too-small budget: stair railings seem residentially-rated and the lobby ceiling seems borrowed from a mall.

Unmonumental has its gems like Kristen Morgin’s Lion and Elliot “I can do no wrong” Hundley’s fragile paper sculptures, however much of the work does not seem new or contain new ideas. To anyone who experienced the Hammer Museum’s Thing sculpture exhibition in Los Angeles a couple years ago, Unmonumental might seem conventional and, well, trendy.

That said, it’s not everyday that a new museum opens and in particular it’s not everyday a museum opens with such a forward vision. They will receive a lot of criticism because their audience is loud and has unreasonable expectations, but they will survive and I can’t wait to see what they do next.