Newest Features
A CONVERSATION WITH BILL ARNING By Matthew Nash As the curator of MIT’s List Visual Art Center, Bill Arning has brought a long list of impressive and challenging shows to the Boston area. Recently, it was announced that Arning will be leaving Boston to take a new position as the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. I sat down with Bill to talk about his work at the List, and his new job at CAMH. Matthew Nash: I had originally scheduled this interview before it was made public that you were…
A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR By Matthew Gamber Over the past few weeks, emotions have erupted in correlation to the economy. Several months ago, we introduced a comment section at the end of each piece. For the first few months, there wasn’t much activity. Though, over the past couple of issues, we have received quite an amazing mass of comments, mostly anonymous. It has been interesting to see what is going on beneath the politeness of everyday exchanges. Typically, art conversation is benign, almost like remarking on the weather. The comments are in…
RACHEL PERRY WELTY @ YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY, NYC By Alan Reid Rachel Perry Welty’s one-person exhibition at Yancey Richardson leaves one conflicted. The show is polite, even seemingly sweet, and while this should perhaps be read as a pejorative, politeness can be fascinating within an oft-abject culture. To further complicate the work, both the means and the overt meaning of this show are arguably puerile. However, in the puerility is an undercurrent of mood, and this is the heart of the matter, if one will dare to conjure the heart. On view is…
TRENDS IN PRE-FAB METAPHORS By Amanda Sanfilippo While in the earlier 20th century Brancusi exploited innate, archetypal forms that one could call the ultimate pre-fab (the egg, the sphere), and Minimalism’s arrival in the 1960’s carried pieces like Tony Smith’s Die into the cannon of art history (I still remember the day I found out that there were more than one Die and that in fact it made absolutely no difference how many there were, because they were not sacred objects in their own right but rather represented an amazing freedom from…
“THE WHITE CUBE” By Thomas Marquet #44: Of course, one should never use “that” to refer to people. Thomas Marquet is a cartoonist, sculptor, and critic, based in Brooklyn, New York, which is an admittedly unoriginal place to be pursuing any of these things.Get The White Cube every day at Tom’s blog.
BIG RED ON-THE-TOWN: LAMONTAGNE GALLERY By Big Red Saturday, February 22nd, 2009 Candid snaps from a Big RED night on-the-town at LaMontagne Gallery for the opening of “Misaki Kawai & Andrew Mowbray”. LaMontagne Gallery
CARLSON/STROM: NEW PERFORMANCE VIDEO @ THE DECORDOVA By James A. Nadeau “There are, therefore, common patterns in various experiences, no matter how unlike they are to one another in the details of their subject matter. There are conditions to be met without which an experience cannot come to be.” – John Dewey, 1934 It takes great skill to create work that not only references art historical moments but also is able to move beyond it. It is deceptively easy to do in terms of form but conceptually? This is much harder to achieve.…
BIG RED ON-THE-TOWN: PLATFORM2: WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? By Big Red Friday, February 27th, 2009 Candid snaps from a Big RED night on-the-town at the studio of Jane Marsching for Platform2’s “Who Do You Think You Are?” This event was a discussion about how artists in interdisciplinary and experimental media identify themselves, and is part of a larger dialog around arts funding. The impetus for this event was a meeting at the Massachusetts Cultural Council to discuss the possibility of a new funding category for experimental media. The MCC was supportive…