Newest Features
“The false color in the original source material reveals the constructed notion of romance through marketing. My horizons are a kind of global travel through the absurdity of the marketing of love.” –Penelope Umbrico, 2003 The first thing one encounters is a horizon. A horizon of pop-colored, heavily pixilated horizon lines which (suggesting that game where one focuses on the “beyond” of an image while waiting for another, 3D, image to emerge) situate the viewer nowhere so much as before an image of their own reflection, sharply skewed amidst an array of…
Many viewers will leave the cinema confused and dissatisfied after seeing “The Fog of War.” Many will have come to see a documentary about Robert McNamara – who they know as one of the most horrible men of one of the most horrible centuries. But whether they “know” him in this manner will not and should not prefigure their final assessment of the film. For it is not a film about the Robert S. McNamara we know as Mass Murderer of Japanese Civilians, Conniving Plotter of the Viet Nam War, Arrogant “son…
This summer while browsing through a copy of Art Journal magazine, I came across the article “Practice in Critical Times,” a dialogue involving the Chicago-based artist group Temporary Services, museum staff at the David and Alfred Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, Dan S. Wang, and Gregory Sholette on the subject of activist and socially engaged approaches to art making. The dialogue participants gave a great deal of attention to how artists and museums can seek to redefine the ways artful representation of ideas can be described and broadcast to a…
I’ve discovered free time – since the Department of Inspectional Services of the City of Boston shut down the Berwick last July because of building code violations – I’m free from the duties of running an arts venue. I’m free to put together projects that are not confined to the Berwick walls. I can curate without worrying if the Berwick’s toilet paper is stocked. I’m free to check out what else is happening on the other walls, stages and public spaces in Boston. I can finally make my own artwork again. Yet,…