Newest Features
By THOMAS MARQUET #58: If the Whitney Biennial is so terrible, why does everyone want to be in it? Thomas Marquet is a cartoonist, sculptor, and critic, based in Brooklyn.
By STEVE AISHMAN It’s a 13-hour flight to Dubai. Not the kind of travel to be taken lightly but worth it for the experience of Art Dubai. For visitors like me, Art Dubai represents more than the other fairs like the Armory Show or Miami Basel because the fair was the best excuse I could come up with to visit the Middle East. Like all art fairs, Art Dubai was primarily focused on sales, however, there was a consolidated effort by the fair to extend beyond the walls of the fair itself…
By KAT KIERNAN I am not sure how to best treat a bloodstain. Is it cold water? Tide? Or must the ruined article of clothing be thrown away? These are the thoughts that ran through my mind while viewing a man gut a bull, ruining his white dress shirt in the process. This oddly grotesque image is one of the many striking staged photographs in Nollywood, a Pieter Hugo exhibition at Yossi Milo gallery in New York. Entering the gallery I was met with a cold stare from a machete-wielding little person.…
By JOSEPH CAMPANA On the way to the Boston ICA to see the latest from the Stephen Petronio Company, I walked past Our Lady of Good Voyage Chapel. Nothing could have better suited Petronio’s ambitious I Drink the Air Before Me, which takes its title and inspiration from a line in The Tempest. Shakespeare’s late play centers on the emotional and political maelstrom unleashed by a shipwreck engineered by Prospero, an exiled Duke turned magician, and his confidante, the spirit Ariel. Terror and comfort, grief and joy, revenge and reconciliation are Shakespeare’s…
By SHANE LAVALETTE Gil Blank is a photographer and writer. His photographs have been exhibited at PS1 Contemporary Art Center and White Columns, New York; The Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver; Ville d’Images, Vevey, Switzerland; Lawrimore Project, Seattle; and LaMontagne Gallery, Boston. His photographs will next be shown at Cardwell Jimmerson in Los Angeles in April 2010. His writing has been published in the monographs White Planet, Black Heart by Torbjørn Rødland and Freischwimmer by Wolfgang Tillmans, as well as in the surveys In Numbers: Serial Artist Editions, 1955 – 2008, published in…
By KURT COLE EIDSVIG Kurt Cole Eidsvig is one of the first recipients of Art Writing Workshop fellowship, a collaboration between the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program and the International Art Critics Association/USA Section (AICA/USA). The program pairs arts writers with leading arts writers and Eidsvig is working with critic Avis Berman. This is the first piece that Eidsvig completed while working with Berman. – Consider this: The permanent quarters of Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, as unveiled on the South Boston waterfront some three years ago, signaled…
By MICAH J. MALONE Legal contracts, artists relationships with science, Boston’s slow march into “the Modern” era, as well as “the capitalist, linear escapism… of the Western Psyche” are just a few of the topics covered in Issue #127. I’d like to say there was an intentional theme we editors conceived for this particular collection of works, but mostly it was contributors pitching stories about what they wanted to write about. Generally speaking, BRS does not delve into thematic issues, but I remain amused when threads of each story overlap in subtle,…
By STEVE AISHMAN Every hero becomes a bore at last. — Emerson I have never been able to throw. And I mean anything. I can’t throw a baseball, tennis ball, Frisbee, whatever. Don’t ask me to toss you a pen or a coin because you’re likely to have to spend more time reaching under the couch to try to find it than just asking me to walk it over to you. It’s also rather dangerous asking me to throw anything in your general direction because I could put your eye out, the…