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This Will Have Been is noisy. Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style (1983) greets you as you get off the elevator, following you into the second room of the exhibit. There you’re confronted by Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley Family Tyranny (Modeling and Modeling) (1987), which doesn’t follow as much as it haunts the next portion, “The End is Near.” There Noam Chomsky or Martha Rosler, harmonizes with Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency, beckoning from the rooms beyond. These sounds amalgamate to suggest what the global 1980s were: a decade of conflict, decadence,…
Most of the time you are not careful with the everyday things. Pardon my saying so, but it is a bit like lack of integrity to ignore the integrity of these things. —Jimmie Durham Among the assurances we are afforded by contemporary culture and its insistent overproduction, the steady stream of commentaries on philosophical themes variously dubbed “object-oriented” or “thing-powered,” guarantees an abundant supply of allegedly post-anthropocentric literature for the contemporary reader. Notwithstanding the often puzzling absence of historical reflexivity—as if no one before the mid-2000s had noticed the agency of non-human…
Here’s a preview of December’s Journal done in YouTube videos Full Circle with Heidi Kayser by James Manning https://youtu.be/2OU33aoSSrw Time Body Space Objects 2 by Matthew Kuhlman https://youtu.be/VbWSrhPOc9E The Growing Trend by Nicole J. Caruth https://youtu.be/9ZEfvrgB78E “The Ugly Americans:” Visual Art as Political Gestures at the Venice Biennale by EL Putnam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl1iWPEm0iw Art After the Nostalgia for Belonging by Etienne Turpin https://youtu.be/yJ0IUsuAYhk This Will Have Been: Leah Triplett continues to track Mark Morrisroe https://youtu.be/iBkKzKXcyzQ NGA: Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective by Kurt Cole Eidsvig https://youtu.be/Ab-7WFx06EA Theatre schools as businesses by Allison Vanouse https://youtu.be/hZ_N_kDjwic…
Michael Roberts Photo © Tahiat Mahboob/Asia Society Michael Roberts, Executive Director for New York Public Programs at the Asia Society, has recently been selected as the new executive director for the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown, the country’s oldest continuous art colony. Bringing over three decades of experience with arts and cultural non-profit organizations, his background is sure to build on the progress implemented by retiring Director Margaret Murphy. Since the summer of 1899, when Charles Hawthorne established the Cape Cod School of Art, Provincetown has grown to be…
Has anyone else noticed that Art Basel Miami Beach seems to have produced its own seasonal affective disorder? Reading Patricia Cohen’s “An Art World Gather, Divided by Money”, a roundup of the usual art world suspects and their art-fair discontents in the New York Times gave me an early Groundhog Day feeling. Every year, around this time, the art critics start piling kindling on that yule log I like to think of as the “Kvetch Before Christmas”—the annual lamentation about how OPM (Other People’s Money) is bad for art. Cohen writes…
20 images projected for 20 seconds each; a speaker with a concise and engaging narrative; an audience. PechaKucha, the Japanese word for the sound of chit-chat, is a popular form of visual presentation, an extended elevator pitch with images, not unlike the successful TED talks. The artists at Boston Sculptors Gallery are choosing to celebrate the collective’s 20th anniversary by adapting the model for a series of individual artist talks. Divided into two broad themes, these presentations will take place in the South End on two separate nights this January. The accompanying…
How’s this for a photographer’s dirty little secret: I often end up wishing I hadn’t gone out of my way to see a photography show in a gallery. I’ve been disappointed too many times by walls full of crappy digital color prints, or by seeing good ideas overpowered by very big enlargements of images that don’t demand (and sometimes can’t support) the outsized presentation so popular in recent years. The good news is, with the exception of a small subset of work that really does rely on a large scale for full…
So, I did a stupid thing. One of the ways my students can get extra credit is if they go to an art event and write a review. The stupid thing I did was reminding them of the extra credit opportunity the same day I announced an upcoming performance of mine. Then I tried to do a happy thing. This BR&S residency has been a really great way to force myself to catch up on some reading. I took a day last week to stay in my bed and read. Coffee…