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By Matthew Nash October 15, 2012 This is just a quick housekeeping note to announce that Big Red & Shiny has upgraded our comment system to LiveFyre. We hope this will offer you a better and more conversational experience with Our Daily Red, and encourage great conversation around art and culture. LiveFyre is a popular commenting system used on many sites, and offers a range of options that improve the commenting discussion. You can now log in with your existing social media accounts, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. You can…
“The Inspection House,” the October show at the Atlantic Works gallery in East Boston, brings together recent work in painting, video, and installation by two local artists, Martha McCollough and Matthew Keller. The theme is the Panopticon, Bentham’s model prison that persists in popular culture and high theory alike as a haunting metaphor for the omnipresent techno-security state. It’s a broad remit that the exhibition successfully focuses through the lenses of voyeurism and surveillance, looking and being looked at. Matthew Keller’s installation, “the ecstasy (the ritual)” dominates his contribution: a board splashed…
Sitting on my desk is a small enamelware cup that I purchased in the gift shop at the new Schindler Factory branch of the Museum of the History of Krakow in Poland. The cup is blue, with a black rim and white interior. It is small, with a comically tiny handle, and as a functional object it’s not quite successful. On the front are printed the words: Fabryka Emalia Oskara Schindlera Lipowa 4 (That is, the name of the Hollywood-famous factory-turned-museum, and the address, in Polish.) Purchasing this cup was the final…
The idea that there is a privileged relationship between the relatively young medium of installation art and the ancient practice of architecture is far from revolutionary. For decades artists and architects have explored shared interests through the medium of installation; these parallel pursuits can be traced as far back as the 1960’s and 1970’s, when installation first rose to prominence within the arts. A handful of artists who emerged as prime examples of the medium’s possibilities were either formally trained as architects or operated as one professionally1 prior to their artistic careers…
Charcoal is made by burning, so an artist might use slivers of charred ruins to draw with. In the midst of all the color, it is the prominence of this dark medium from out of the flames that resonates most strongly in these works by Ahmed Alsoudani. For all their scale (the largest is 72 x 108 in) these works document a grand history of pain in very small spaces. Inevitably, none of these pictures have titles. The dreadful realities which they draw from are unnamable, though familiar enough to those who…
In historicizing the minimalist canvas, critics have pointed to some form of the merger between the subject of a painting and the object used to support it—for a few this “maddening” notion was the “subjectile,” that physical part of art which allows for presentation (a frame, a canvas, a support). This merger of the subject and the object provided much of the pretext for late modernism’s approach to painting, engrossed as it was in the power of the subjectile over the painted image. In Gag, a series of new works by Analia…
Everything will be ok, just close your eyes little thing go to sleep little fuck feel my hand on your warm forehead It’s cold isn’t it? Ice cold. Dream of something real sweet for mommy Mommy likes sweet things Dream of merry-go-rounds and cotton candy Mommy’s hand got all warm resting on your tiny head See, look at mommy’s hand It got all warm now You’re running a slight fever Mommy will get you some water And you’re running a slight fever Little fuck don’t have to go to school tomorrow but no playing…
Just as it’s expected that rock bands rail against the machinations of the music industry, and indie filmmakers lament the hollowness of Hollywood, it’s a condition of those working in or with art that the ‘art world’ be berated as something lacking in the authentic dedication to art, beauty, ideas (etc) to be found, presumably, in the practice of the speaker. Further, it’s a condition of those working in the art world that the phrase ‘art world’ be used to denote something intrinsically different from the speaker’s own position. The ‘art world’…