Considering how much energy artists of the last 120 years have put into subverting boundaries, testing conventions, inventing ostentatiously category-defying new techniques, and tapping emphatically non-fine art technologies it is supremely curious that modernism’s principal collecting and theorizing institution is so rigidly organized by medium-defined curatorial departments. Prints and Illustrated Books, Drawings, Film and Media, Photography: what a glutton for punishment MoMA is, to demarcate so unruly a period along the lines of the very disciplines it subverted.
Even stranger, having divvied up the century by medium, is that the two time-hallowed activities that witnessed most acutely the striving for medium specificity are actually thrust together. Painting and Sculpture is the grand duchy among the fiefdoms—perhaps, indeed (along late Hapsburg lines) the dual monarchy. MoMA’s taxonomy spotlights a struggle at the heart of modernism between materialism and transcendence, essence and dissolution—the very codependency, perhaps, that keeps painting and sculpture together. More…
The pianist Robert Taub was puttering around the house one afternoon in 2004 while his teen-age daughter was practicing for a violin lesson — a Schubert sonatina in A minor. His assessment of her playing was diplomatic: “She needed to be reminded about notes and rhythms.”
What followed was a brainstorm that explains why Mr. Taub — who made his reputation playing two distinctly different B’s, Beethoven and Milton Babbitt — has put his performing on hold, and why “software entrepreneur” now tops his résumé.
“I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful if she could take a photograph of her page of music and hear it instantaneously,” he recalled. “She’d know what the right notes are, and what the right rhythms are, and she could imitate what she heard.”
Soon he was dreaming of a device — or maybe just software running on a computer — that could do everything he had learned to do in music theory class: read and play a printed musical score, and listen to a passage of music and transcribe it, down to the key signature, the tempo and the time signature. He said that a quick check showed that nothing then on the market could do all that. More…
Tim Nye, the bon vivant, Park Avenue heir and Chelsea gallery owner, has a theory about art openings. “You’ve got to do something that makes them say ‘Wow.’ ”
By that standard, the festivities for Swell, a three-gallery exhibition on surfing-inspired art that opened last month, lived up to expectations.
This was no typical art opening, in a windowless white box with chablis in plastic cups. Instead, the post-opening party crammed 250 scruffy artists, well-dressed buyers and art world insiders onto a 108-foot wooden Turkish sailing yacht moored on the Hudson River. A live band thundered funk-inflected free jams, while kegs flowed. The artist Norton Wisdom created a “live painting” on a sheet of translucent vellum illuminated by stage lights.
Always near the center of the action, sporting a broad mustache and chin puff, was Mr. Nye. “People are so jaded,” he said, shouting over the band while he leaned against the port railing. “You have to make it a happening.”
That seems to be his specialty. But Mr. Nye is not your usual scion of a New York real estate fortune, going about town, quietly sprinkling money around art fairs and museum boards. He has always tended to make big professional statements. In the 1990s, he earned millions of his own, as a high-flying dot-com entrepreneur, when the Web was in its unprofitable infancy. More…
The Sixth International Conference on the Arts in Society will be held in Berlin, Germany in June of 2011 at the Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW).
Thank you to all of those who contributed to the 2010 Arts Conference, held at The University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts in Sydney, Australia. The conference brought together delegates from many backgrounds and discipline areas, continuing the conference’s commitment to inclusive dialogue.
Both delegates who attended the conference and virtual delegates may upload their presentations and videos to the Arts Conference YouTube channel. (Information on uploading your presentation available here.) You may also be a part of our Common Ground YouTube community by joining the conference group and becoming a subscriber (click on the yellow “subscribe” button in the top left corner of the screen).
Additionally, please join our online conversation by subscribing to our monthly email newsletter and subscribing to our Facebook, RSS, or Twitter feeds at http://artsinsociety.com.
It is no doubt that the 2011 Arts Conference will continue on the momentum and successes of this year’s conference, and we are pleased to be hosting the conference in Berlin and at the Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Please continue to check the conference webpage, newsletter and blog for further information and conference announcements at http://artsinsociety.com/.
To those of you that joined us at the 2010 Arts Conference in Sydney, or if you’ve participated in a previous conference, please share your photos of the conference with your friends and colleagues that you met while at the conference. Pictures of the conference sessions, dinner, tour, the Biennale and ‘down time’ are all welcome!
Join our Arts Conference Flickr group here, and upload your pictures to easily share. Once you’ve joined, simply click on ‘Add something?’, and upload your photos or videos of the conference.
For information on sharing your photos with Flickr, please read more here.
Remember the Mozart effect? Thanks to a suggestion in 1993 that listening to Mozart makes you cleverer, there has been a flood of compilation CDs filled with classical tunes that will allegedly boost your baby’s brain power.
Yet there’s no evidence for this claim, and indeed the original ‘Mozart effect’ paper1 did not make it. It reported a slight, short-term performance enhancement in some spatial tasks when preceded by listening to Mozart as opposed to sitting in silence. Some follow-up studies replicated the effect, others did not. None found it specific to Mozart; one study showed that pop music could have the same effect on schoolchildren2. It seems this curious but marginal effect stems from the cognitive benefits of any enjoyable auditory stimulus, which need not even be musical.
The original claim doubtless had such inordinate impact because it plays to a long-standing suspicion that music makes you smarter. And as neuroscientists Nina Kraus and Bharath Chandrasekaran of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, point out in a review published today in Nature Reviews Neuroscience3, there is good evidence that music training reshapes the brain in ways that convey broader cognitive benefits. It can, they say, lead to “changes throughout the auditory system that prime musicians for listening challenges beyond music processing”. More…
Rebellion was everywhere in the 1960s, recalls Sally Feldman, but Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch made the most audacious demand of all: for a feminist revolution that was personal and political
When I started university in the late 1960s I thought I had the world at my feet. We all did. We were the children of the post-war boom, of swinging London and psychedelia. We were the ones who were going to change the world and it really seemed as if the transformation had begun, especially for women. In our first term, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the album of the moment. We’d all pile into Lynn Barker’s room in hall to absorb the full virtuosity of the Beatles on her stereo. We also tried to squeeze into Gary Arlott’s room to squeal at Monty Python on his TV, but failed because girls weren’t allowed in men’s halls in the evenings. That outrage led to our first political sit-in. While other campuses were raging against the Vietnam war and the Kent State shootings in the US, we campaigned against the university’s paternalistic residential strictures.
One girl, whose name was Sheila I think, ignored those constraints with glorious abandon. She was the university social secretary for a while, booking bands who today would not have got out of bed unless it was to perform at the O2 centre or Wembley, but in those days did the campus circuit just like everyone else. The Who played at a Saturday night disco, The Animals at another. Pink Floyd and Jeff Beck serenaded our May Ball. One night Sheila managed to smuggle into her room an entire band, The Move, plus their two roadies. Unfortunately, the warden of the hall had decided to take advantage of the balmy summer evening to hold a bridge party on her lawn. Disturbed by sounds of thudding and gasping, she flashed her torch into the shrubbery, only to confront the spectacle of a line of shaggy-haired rockers climbing out of Sheila’s window, way after curfew. More…
Since America finally entered the debate about studio-based PhDs in the visual arts, books, magazine articles and conference halls have been filled with discussion on the topic. Every conceivable point of view has been put forward: some urge a total rethink of the whole university system, in addition to the art school’s place within it; others urge an expansion of how we define research; and yet others, such as Robert Storr at Yale University, deny that artists do, or should do, research at all.
Most of us know what it is like when a department or school goes through that death by a thousand cuts known as a restructure. Every faculty member puts forward his or her utopian vision of how an art school should be run, but in the end nothing is agreed, which is usually just as well because management has probably decided already.
It is a little like that with the whole PhD debate. Many, although by no means all, who lead the debate in print come from a “theory” background and see theory as making up a large part of the studio-based PhD submission. However, many of those theoreticians have never fully understood that art is a language in its own right, like music or mathematics, and arguments can be made in paint and through drawing and photography, or in the physicality of matter (sculpture, installation art) without recourse to words. More…
Merilyn Fairskye will be joining the 2010 Arts Conference as a plenary speaker. Saturday, 24 July she will present her work, ‘Fieldwork - Chernobyl’. After her plenary she will also be available for an informal Q&A, or Garden Session.
Merilyn Fairskye is an artist and academic whose work is exhibited in art galleries, public spaces, electronic arts and film festivals within Australia and internationally and is represented in numerous Australian and international public collections. She has undertaken artist residencies in the USA, Italy, France and Australia and has been the recipient of many Australia Council and Australian Film Commission grants, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. From 2007-2009 she was Associate Dean, Research at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. She is currently on sabbatical and on her return will teach in the Photomedia Studio at SCA. More…
Djon Mundine is a curator and art historian, originally from the Northern Rivers area of NSW. He is currently Indigenous Curator, Contemporary Art at Campbelltown Arts Centre. Mundine is well known as the concept curator of the permanent Aboriginal Memorial installation at the National Gallery of Australia and was awarded an OAM in 1993. Previous positions have included: Senior Curator, Gallery of Aboriginal Australia, National Museum of Australia, Senior Curator of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Programs, MCA, and Art Adviser for the Ramingining Community of Central Arnhem Land. More…
On Wednesday, 21 July, we have organized a Pre-Conference Day Tour of the 17th Biennale of Sydney with Dr. Caleb Kelly from the University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts, including visits to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Pier 2/3 and Cockatoo Island.
The conference dinner will be held in the Auditorium at Sydney College of the Arts, providing a perfect setting to dine with friends and colleagues.
Join us for a three course sit-down meal, including entree, main dish, dessert, wine, beer and beverages, as well as all taxes and gratuity.
Prior to the conference dinner, we welcome you to join us for our featured Book Launch–BRUCE BARBER: WORK 1970-2008, edited by Blair French and Stephen Cleland. The launch will begin just after the conclusion of the day’s sessions at 5:15 PM (17:15). The dinner will then begin in the Auditorium at 6:15 PM (18:15).
For more information and to reserve your place on the pre-conference tour and/or at the conference dinner, please see the conference Activities and Extras.
The 2010 Arts Conference, held at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, will feature special exhibitions from proppaNOW Aboriginal Artists Collective and Shanghai based artist Wang Tiande. Conference participants are invited to attend the Artists’ Reception and Exhibition Opening after the conference on Thursday, 22 July from 5:00-7:00 PM.
Additionally, prior to the conference dinner on Friday, 23 July, participants are invited to our featured book launch, BRUCE BARBER: WORK 1970-2008, edited by Blair French and Stephen Cleland.
Paul Barman thinks his is a great idea for a business: personalized, hip-hop versions of the traditional Jewish wedding contract, known as the ketubah, that he writes and sings.
He calls them Audioketubah and, at $1,500, they come in the form of handwritten scrolls and CDs, perfect gifts for a couple who cannot stomach another set of stemware.
Juan Hinojosa makes collages from found materials like Metrocards and food wrappers, and clothing tags that he filches from high-end stores. He often brings an attractive female friend along to distract the staff while he snips off the labels, though he said he has never actually taken anything of value.
On five Saturdays this month and next, Mr. Barman, Mr. Hinojosa and 54 other artists are attending a class paid for by the City of New York that is intended to help them turn their creative works into money. More…
Vermeer’s painting of a maidservant pouring milk, on loan to the Met from the Rijksmuseum is a work of extraordinary fullness in every respect. This feeling of uncanny amplitude is partly the result of how in the way Vermeer made his own sunlight coursing through a window (a “cool graced light,” in Frank’s O’Hara’s phrase, if ever there was one) acts on bits of earthly surface, affording a kind of extreme visibility to each thing exposed in its path. Light in Vermeer is such a fact of aesthetic experience, so intrinsic to everyone’s appreciation of his art, that it may have blinded us to a great deal else that shows up in the pictures.
Neither signed nor dated, on a near-square canvas nearly a foot and a half in either dimension, the picture, for all its grandeur, seems a hinge work of Vermeer’s early maturity. Better known nowadays as The Milkmaid, it’s an anomaly within his output generally, its worked-up surface and culinary subject matter stated comparatively coarsely, a less delicate image overall than the preternatural refinements soon to come. The Met curator and scholar of Dutch art Walter Liedtke places it historically in the company of other paintings, some of them, like the Cavalier and Young Woman in the Frick, in similarly compact formats done around 1657-58, when Vermeer was in his mid-twenties. More…
In a comment on Arthur C. Danto’s post, “Sitting With Marina,” a reader, TM Shier, wrote: “This article is a disappointment. It is descriptive, not explanatory. It answers none of the really interesting questions raised.” Those questions, as posed by the reader, and Mr. Danto’s answers, are below:
Q.Is performance art really art at all?
A. We must determine what art is or how it is defined before answering this question. The oldest theory of art in the West is to be found in Plato, in Book X of “The Republic.” There, Socrates defines art as imitation. He then declares that it is very easy to get perfect imitations — by means of mirrors. His intent is to show that art belongs to the domain of reflections, shadows, illusions, dreams. He proceeds to map the universe in terms of three degrees of reality. The highest reality is found in the domain of what he calls “ideas,” the forms of things. Ideas are grasped by the mind. The next degree of reality is possessed by ordinary objects, the kind carpenters make. The artist only know how ordinary objects look, as rendered in painting or drawings. The carpenter’s knowledge is higher than the artist’s: his beds, for example, hold the sleeping body or, more strenuously, bodies locked in love. The highest knowledge is possessed by those who grasp the idea of the bed, understanding how it supports the body. The lowest knowledge, if it is knowledge at all, is the artist’s ability to draw pictures of beds. They only show appearances. More…
One aspect of Chuck Close’s life inevitably overshadows all others. In 1988, two decades into a scintillating career as a painter of what Christopher Finch calls “ruthlessly detailed – some would say pitiless – supersized portraits”, the American artist suffered a collapsed spinal artery, paralysing him from the shoulders down. And yet, having agonisingly won back some movement and attached a paintbrush to his hand via a splint, Close was soon painting again. Three years later, he was as successful as ever. It helped that shortly before what he calls “The Event”, he’d developed a method of assembling imagery from tiny loops and lozenges of colour arranged in a grid, and although quadriplegic he could still do that: “as if the artist, while healthy, had anticipated a need,” Finch writes. Yet it surely helped more that Close is a world-class survivor.
As Finch’s detailed biography makes clear, the artist received matchless grounding in earlier years. Close grew up with neuromuscular disorders that made it difficult for him to walk straight or raise his arms, plus severe astigmatism, dyslexia and attendant learning difficulties, and – the disadvantage that was probably the making of him – prosopagnosia, the inability to recognise faces, which made him obsessed with the mechanics of their depiction. More…
Lowbrow meets highbrow on Bravo’s new reality-television series Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. The show, which premieres next Wednesday, tracks 14 contestants as they compete to win $100,000 and a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum.
“Look—we’ve done it with food and fashion and hair and interior design, I think we can do it with art,” says Bravo senior vice president Andy Cohen, when asked if developing a high-concept show about art was a programming executive’s worst nightmare.
Cohen attributes his confidence to the producers: Sarah Jessica Parker, and her production company Pretty Matches, and Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz, of Magical Elves. Since Cutforth and Lipsitz banded together in 2001, the Elves have been busy shifting the focus of reality television from double-dare matchups such as Survivor, to creative competitions. Their collective hits, including Project Runway and Top Chef, have earned the duo an impressive reputation and secured Bravo a loyal, and growing, 18-to-49 demographic. Even better, the shows are cheap to make. More…
In 1975, when I was a critic for the Times, an editor sat me down and told me that the paper was cutting back on reviews in favor of features. He added that there was a big future for a young man who wanted to be an investigative reporter in the art world. What story did he have in mind? The dealings of Leo Castelli. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. That year, a celebrated conviction of the dealer Frank Lloyd, for conspiring to plunder the estate of Mark Rothko, fed popular suspicions that the art world was a quasi-criminal enterprise zone, in which Castelli—who had a near-monopoly on the top artists and sold their work for prices that seemed fantastic—figured to be the gangster-in-chief. And what young journalist didn’t ache for the laurels of a Woodward or a Bernstein? I didn’t. I liked the art world, and I revered Castelli, though he made me nervous. Treated to the silken manners and melting gaze of the small, neat man from Trieste—with his unplaceable accent, which Tom Wolfe described as “soft, suave, and slightly humid, like a cross between Peter Lorre and the first secretary of a French embassy”—I felt like a farm boy with cow pies in my pockets. He sensed this, I’m convinced, and left me alone when I visited the holy of holies that was his gallery, first at 4 East Seventy-seventh Street and, after 1971, at 420 West Broadway, flashing me the odd quick knowing smile. Leo (almost no one who met him even once called him anything else) wielded custom-tailored ways of making people feel special—all people, because he crowned his Continental glamour with a faintly comic and completely endearing American-style openness. More…
The 2010 Arts Conference, 22-25 July, University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts, will be hosting a Special Exhibition, proppaNOW: Women Artists, Women’s Business.
The exhibition, proppaNOW: Women Artists, Women’s Business, features the art works of proppaNOW Aboriginal Artists Collective’s Brisbane-based members Jennifer Herd, Bianca Beetson and Andrea Fisher. The exhibition presents the artists’ innovative approaches to Aboriginal Art and contemporary urban expressions that situate Indigenous women’s art as central to Australian art history and national culture. Fresh from the Putsch exhibit at Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, proppaNOW artists look to overthrow institutionalized racism, stereotypes, urban myths and romanticised views of contemporary Indigenous art.
The artists will speak at the Arts Conference on Friday, July 23rd, as part of a panel in conversation with Professors Tressa Berman and Pat Hoffie.
The brains behind the daringly clever TSA Communicator project, iconoclastic technology artist Evan Roth is now spearheading an equally compelling software project, Graffiti Analysis.
Roth and his co-collaborators have developed an open source application that works with iPhones and others to capture the movements of graffiti artists and digitize the motion-rich styles into programming language that can be stored, swapped and recreated.
“The project aims to build the world’s largest archive of graffiti motion, and bring together two seemingly disparate communities that share an interest hacking systems, whether found in code or in the city,” Roth states. More…
Over the past decade, Chakaia Booker has become one of America’s most important contemporary sculptors. Chakaia Booker: In and Out is the largest and most comprehensive museum exhibition of this African-American artist’s work to date, and represents the wide range of Booker’s practice from the mid-1990s to the present. The exhibition includes monumental outdoor sculptures, indoor sculpture in a wide variety of formats and sizes, drawings, and photographs.
Chakaia Booker is best known for the material and process that characterize the majority of her work: cut-up automobile tires that are reassembled on wooden or steel armatures to create abstract sculptures. This recycled material, and the surface patterns that it creates, reference African textiles and body decoration to evoke issues of black culture, identity, gender, and environmentalism. For more information…
When the photographer Philippe Halsman said, “Jump,” no one asked how high. People simply pushed off or leapt up to the extent that physical ability and personal decorum allowed. In that airborne instant Mr. Halsman clicked the shutter. He called his method jumpology.
The idea of having people jump for the camera can seem like a gimmick, but it is telling that jumpology shares a few syllables with psychology. As Halsman, who died in 1979, said, “When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping, and the mask falls, so that the real person appears.”
A wonderful exhibition of nearly 50 jumps that Halsman captured on film from the late 1940s through the ’50s — sometimes on commission from Life magazine — can be seen at the Laurence Miller Gallery at 20 West 57th Street in Manhattan, through Friday. More…
So far this spring we’ve witnessed public displays of art ranging from British sculptor Antony Gormley’s “Event Horizon,” 31 statues of atomically correct naked men standing on roof ledges and street corners in New York City’s Flatiron neighborhood, to the “Elephant Parade,” 250 life-size painted elephant sculptures positioned throughout central London. Now we can add another installation to the list of this year’s big P.D.A.’s: Spanish artist Manolo Valdés’s exhibition “Monumental Sculptures on Broadway,” 16 bronze sculptures situated along Broadway from Columbus Circle to 166th Street, in New York City. The word monumental is no exaggeration; some of the works are more than 12 feet tall, while others weigh in at more than 2,000 pounds. The show, a collaboration of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, the Broadway Mall Association, Marlborough Gallery, and the New York City Department of Transportation, runs from today through January 31, 2011. More…
Artist/filmmaker Pat O’Neill’s 1989 Sundance Grand Jury Prize–winning experimental feature Water & Power — a sort-of Chinatown-meets–Koyaanisqatsi-on-nootropics dealie — is rightfully recognized as one of the signal artifacts of late 20th century L.A. culture, not to mention a radical turning point in experimental cinema. Since making that splash, after a quarter-century toiling in the experimental-cinema mines (and the somewhat more lucrative special-effects fields), O’Neill has expanded his reputation into the art world with gallery and museum exhibitions of his sculptures, drawings, prints and projection-based installations. His double-barreled 2002 magnum opus film/interactive CD-ROM, The Decay of Fiction, took his ambivalent relationship with narrative into even more interdimensional realms (by way of Hollywood noir and the Ambassador Hotel), and marked his first artistic engagement with digital media. More…
“That deaf, dumb, and blind kid / sure plays a mean pinball!” the Who sang about the eponymous hero of their rock opera Tommy. And when the audience responded too rowdily to one live performance, the drummer Keith Moon is said to have yelled back, “Have some respect! It’s a fucking opera!”
Tommy was widely understood at the time to be campaigning for the aesthetic dignity of rock and roll, a battle that has long since been won. Less apparently, this was also the opening salvo in a similar battle on behalf of games: “arcade games” at the time, and computer games as we know them now. Computer games are the latest cultural form to benefit from the collapse of the old and now embarrassing categories of high-, low-, and middlebrow. Once a slightly seditious form of loafing in teenage wastelands of the ’70s, games have won ever greater cultural legitimacy in our own unibrow period. More…
David Elliott is the Artistic Director of the 17th Biennale of Sydney. He is a curator, writer, broadcaster and museum director primarily concerned with modern and contemporary art. Elliott was Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England from 1976–96, Director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden from 1996–2001, the founding Director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan from 2001–2006 and, in 2007 the first Director of Istanbul Modern, Turkey. From 1998–2004, he was President of CIMAM (the International Committee of ICOM for Museums and Collections of Modern Art) and in 2008, he was the Rudolf Arnheim Guest Professor of Art History at Humboldt University, Berlin. More…
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“Intifada is a site-specific installation whose theme focuses the problematic of the physical boundaries,” says No. “It could be seen as a solution of self-defense or, in other point of view, as an excuse or justification for segregation. It is a work who also talks about intolerance and lack of communication, oppression and abuse of power, questioning concepts as Territory, Frontiers and Exclusion.” More at Dezeen.com…
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins by submitting a paper proposal. More information on proposals, presentation types, and other options available here. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. 2010 Arts Conference registration options.
American artist Jenny Holzer has a new exhibition that just opened at the Baltic in Newcastle. Displayed over the Baltic’s two largest galleries, the exhibition consists of paintings, sculptures and her spectacular LED installations. Famous for her ‘Truisms’, in the 1970s she began to use text as art, creating provocative writings displayed and distributed through means akin to the mass media – on fly posts, T-shirts and, in 1982, even the LED billboard in New York’s Times Square.
The dance music thundered through a crowd of thousands of drunken fans, past the pavilions where skinny women in impossibly high heels gyrated around metal poles and into the streets filled with taxis that ferried partygoers to this free, whiskey-soaked concert in the park.
“Our parents don’t allow it, but we do it anyway,” said Zun Pwint Phyu, one of the dancers who endured hours of lascivious stares.
Myanmar is a country where owning a fax machine without a permit is illegal, where even spontaneous gatherings of more than five people are technically banned and where critics of the government are regularly locked away for decades in tiny prison cells.
Yet despite this repression, or perhaps partly because of it, young people here are pushing the limits of what the military government, let alone their parents, considers acceptable art and entertainment.
Art exhibitions, some featuring risky hidden political messages, open nearly every week in Yangon, Myanmar’s main city. Yangon has a festival of underground music, including punk bands, twice a year. Fans of the most popular musical genres, hip-hop and electronic dance music, wear low-slung baggy pants to regularly held concerts here. More…
It is 7AM, April 5, Palm Sunday in Salt Lake City, and the roads are empty. The Wasatch Mountains tower to the east, yielding no ground to the rising sun. In their shadow driving north on Interstate-15 I’ve set forth on a pilgrimage to a work of art. For thirty years I worshiped in the temple of the aesthetic. It’s never been tombs or trees or battlefields, or monuments or the homes of the stars that have answered to my search for the sacred in the wilderness of the secular. It’s been my taking it upon myself to stand as a pilgrim in the presence of an art object in which I know that we’re not alone in the universe.
Today the object of my journey is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, an earthwork belonging to an aesthetic movement known as land art, which the Prestel Dictionary of Art and Artists defines as “art which, rather than depicting nature, instead tries to awaken ecological, cultural or social consciousness of the environment through interventions or performances in the natural world itself.” In Nevada in 1969, Michael Heizer excavated a quarter of a million tons of sandstone to create Double Negative, a straight trench thirty feet wide, fifty feet long, and a third of a mile deep. Since 1972 he has been bulldozing his way across the Nevada desert to create City, a series of five massive installations promising to become the largest piece of art ever made. “I’m building this work for later,” Heizer has said. “I’m interested in making a work of art that will represent all civilization to this point.” Unsurprisingly, it remains unfinished. From 1973-77 Walter De Maria planted four hundred stainless steel posts in a grid one mile long and one kilometer wide in a mountain-rimmed valley in New Mexico: Lightning Field. Well beyond museum halls, scattered around the American West like versions of Stonehenge and Machu Pichu, these and other such works are difficult to reach, intended to be seen by pilgrims such as myself. More…
New York’s Museum of Modern Art announced today that it has acquired the @ symbol. This now means Twitter is technically art. MoMA’s chief design curator, Paola Antonelli credits computer engineer/ersatz modern artist Ray Tomlinson with “imbuing [the symbol] with new meaning and elevating it to defining symbol of the computer age.” More…
In Australia in 1971, a 30-year-old white Sydney schoolteacher named Geoff Bardon took a posting in the Aboriginal-relocation community of Papunya in the outback west of Alice Springs, teaching art to the children of the patchwork indigenous community. When he began to encourage them to paint the traditional patterns they habitually traced in the sand — instead of the westernized cowboy-and-Indian scenarios that were expected of them — he inadvertently triggered one of the most remarkable artistic events of the 20th century. The Western Desert Art Movement began as a sudden outpouring of traditional visual material by dirt-poor male Aboriginal elders in this unlikely remote location, and has basically continued unabated, while expanding into a successful multibillion-dollar niche of the international art market and a major source of economic support, cultural pride and political empowerment for the indigenous Australian people.
Less than two years after arriving in Papunya, having broken under the pressure of racist individuals and institutions that wanted to stick to helping the natives with the tried-and-true strategies of incremental genocide, a.k.a. assimilation (and Johnny-on-the-spot carpetbaggers eager to cheat the artists out of even the relative pittances their canvases fetched in those early days), Bardon fled the settlement in the middle of the night, and unwittingly committed himself into the hands of notorious psychiatrist Dr. Harry Bailey, whose MK-ULTRA-style “treatments” consisted of lengthy induced barbiturate comas spiked with massive electroshocks — sometimes on a daily basis and often unauthorized. Twenty-six people died while under his care, and many others — Bardon included — were left permanently disabled. Continual pressure from dissatisfied customers, activists (including Scientology!) and journalists finally got Bailey’s “deep-sleep therapy” clinic shut down, and Bailey killed himself in 1985 in the face of a government investigation. More…
How deep is Bruegel’s pessimism? I guess the question is inseparable from that of his relation to Christianity. (He was no fool: the question is insoluble.) And from the issue of comedy. How much was horror played for laughs? Does laughter take the edge off things?
Consider the Triumph of Death in Madrid. How common a subject was it in Bruegel’s time? And where does the title come from? Of course the basic idea stems from the world of late-medieval prints and wall painting—the last time I saw it, the painting resonated immediately with a Dance of Death I had seen a fortnight before in the parish church at La Ferté-Loupière. But was not Bruegel aware that in turning a Dance of Death into a panorama of Death’s final solution—a disciplined army carrying out a scorched earth policy—he was steering into a different, more dangerous world? This is Hell, certainly, but also Last Judg-ment—with now the dead coming out of their graves not to accept reward or punishment but simply to take revenge on the living. In a way that seems typical, Bruegel insists on the closeness of the story he is telling to that of Christian resurrection of the body. Twice he shows members of the skeleton crew busily digging up the coffins of their comrades, and right at the center of the painting, in the mid-background, is a skeleton stepping from his grave (next to a horrible, blood-red filigree cross: signs of Christian burial are swallowed in the general tide of malignancy). More…
Photography’s surprising impact on the Surrealists
From The Smart Set at Drexel University…
Surrealism isn’t surreal anymore. It doesn’t shock or jolt. It isn’t confusing or upsetting. If anything, the works of Surrealism have taken on a quaint charm. This would surely have annoyed its practitioners. The great theorist of Surrealism, André Breton, thought of himself as a revolutionary. He once wrote, “Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.” Like most big talkers, he was wrong. Surrealism didn’t ruin anything or solve anything either.
Surrealism did its best, though, to shake things up. Looking out at the madness of modern life in the early 20th century, Surrealism said, “Bring it on.” The show currently on display at the International Center of Photography, “Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris,” makes that patently clear. Paris inspired the Surrealists. There was so much going on. The chaos of traffic and lights and humanity was constantly producing jarring images. Reality seemed to blur into a dream state and then back again. More…
When we walk into the denuded Guggenheim, finally wiggling past Lloyd Wright’s low-ceilinged, dark and deliberately claustrophobia-inducing entrance foyer, it takes us a few seconds to adjust to all the open space spiraling upwards and outwards around us. There’s a couple, good-looking college kids or twenty-somethings, hetero, going at it on the floor of the atrium, near the fountain. The crowd gives them wide berth. They writhe sinuously, mouth to mouth, kissing or pretending to kiss, rising onto their knees, palms flat on the other’s backs. Their hands slide down with exaggerated slowness until the palms rest flat on the floor, the first sign that there’s something artificial at work here, either in the lovers’ determined tantric exhibitionism, or the non-lovers, non-erotic erotics. Yet, as they slide once more into each other, until the black-haired girl is lying across the red-haired kid’s lap, and he doesn’t so much grab as guide her ass, with the palm again, deliberately flattened against the curve of thigh and cheek, until her legs curl into him, and her shirt rides up to reveal a naked back he will never touch, although it is the touch we are all waiting for, as, instead, she reaches up to cup his face in both hands and pull him down into a kiss, soundless this whole time, it is difficult to know how much of this is, in fact, performance, staging, whatever you want to call it, and what feelings or other unintentional stirrings we’re also witness to. More…
After a museumgoer’s trip and fall opened a rip in a century-old Picasso painting last week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, officials there assured the public that — nightmarish as accidents are at a place entrusted with protecting priceless art — conservators would be able to fix the work quickly, in time for a major Picasso show in April.
But two other rare mishaps at the Met in recent years have provided hard lessons about the difficulty of making broken masterpieces whole again and of predicting when they will go back on view.
In 2002 a 15th-century marble statue by the Venetian sculptor Tullio Lombardo — one of the most important High Renaissance statues in the museum’s collection — crashed to the floor and broke into hundreds of pieces when part of its dense plywood base buckled. Nearly six years later an Andrea della Robbia terra-cotta relief from the same period shattered after falling from a shelf above a doorway. Neither piece is back on view. More…
This thread over at Unfogged reminds me of something that’s puzzled me for years, ever since reading this: why didn’t prints displace paintings the same way that printed books displaced manuscript codices? Why didn’t it become the expected thing that visual artists, like writers, would primarily produce works for reproduction? (No doubt, in that branch of the wave-function*, obsessive fans still want to get the original drawings, but obsessive fans also collect writer’s manuscripts, or even theirtypewriters, as well as their mass-produced books.) 16th century engraving technology was strong enough that it could implement powerful works of art (vide), so that can’t be it. And by the 18th century at least writers could make a living (however precarious) from writing for the mass public, so why were visual artists (for the most part) weren’t artists? (Again, it’s manifestly not as though technology has regressed.) Why is it still the case that a real, high-class visual artist is someone who makes one-offs? I know that reproductions have been important since at least the late 1800s, but for works and artists who first made their reputation with unique, hand-made objects, which is as though the only books which got sent to the printing press were ones which had first circulated to acclaim in manuscript. More…
Michelangelo wrote some wonderful sonnets; Constable’s correspondence has a fascinating tough-tenderness; most visualisers have, with varying degrees of success, tried to match words to their images. But Van Gogh’s letters are the best written by any artist. Engrossing, moving, energetic and compelling, they dramatise individual genius while illuminating the creative process in general. No wonder readers have long since taken them to heart. No wonder, either, that singers have used them in their songs (”Starry Night”), and film-makers as the basis of their movies (Lust for Life). Their mixture of humble detail and heroic aspiration is quite simply life-affirming.
Received wisdom has it that the letters show Van Gogh as a tortured genius. Yet anyone who has actually read them (rather than watched the movie) will feel uncomfortable about this. There are, of course, harrowing stretches in which he frets about insanity, about poverty and about how others perceive him. But the great majority of them are impressive – even lovable – because, no matter how distressing their surrounding circumstances, they show an extraordinarily calm-sounding good sense and a beautiful directness in their account of complicated emotional states. This sense of balance, which frankly amounts to nobility, has been evident in all editions of his letters, ever since the first was published by his sister-in-law, Jo Bonger, in 1914. In this new edition it is even more vividly manifest. More…
Lens Culture, an online magazine celebrating international contemporary photography, art, media, and world culture, has a piece on the 2009 Photoquai Festival in Paris…
Photoquai, the biennial festival of photography based in Paris, was founded in 2007. Dedicated to non-western photography, the festival aims to to raise the international profile of artists previously unexhibited or little-known in Europe. It also aims to foster cultural exchange — and the vibrant interchange of different world views.
This year, the Guest of Honor at Photoquai is Iran. The festival has been directed by Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh, an Iranian gallerist and founder of the Silk Road Gallery in Tehran, a space specifically dedicated to photography. More…
City Gallery is a modern art virtual gallery, presenting contemporary video art, photographic art, and performances and scripts on the internet. Since 2005, City Gallery has organized approximately 30 modern art exhibits that make use of the language of media. The current exhibit is available at http://www.citygallery.pl/.
As a crew of riggers finished hoisting a big taxidermied water buffalo onto its surreal perch the other day at the Asia Society Museum on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, there was a certain logistical satisfaction for those who looked on. “Watch the tail, guys, the tail!” one rigger yelled as the beast was pivoted into place atop a tall Ionic column, where it seemed to have climbed in its confusion.
But the sense of symbolic accomplishment in the feat was much greater. The water buffalo is a ubiquitous presence in many areas of Pakistan, where its tail is often painted red with henna. And the ascension of one onto a pedestal — to create a comically eerie sculpture by the artist Huma Mulji — was an apt metaphor for the larger exhibition being installed around it that morning in several of the museum’s galleries. More…
