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…
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…
It is without any sense of surprise, but with the greatest of pleasure that I inform you that our very own Morgan Meis has been awarded an extremely well-deserved $30,000 by the Warhol Foundation in recognition of the excellence of his writing on art.
About eighteen months ago, the former fashion designer turned TV host turned bookmaker Todd Oldham moved his office from Soho, which he finally admitted had become “too like a shopping mall,” to an erstwhile law office in a building across from St. Paul’s Chapel in lower Manhattan. The main rooms have fantastic windows: They stretch nearly from floor to ceiling, providing spectacular views of both the chapel’s cemetery and the hive of cranes and activity that’s begun to fill up ground zero.
Oldham was there on a recent afternoon, dressed like an 8-year-old boy in blue jeans and a slim piqué polo shirt covered in a pattern of grizzly bears. The only visibly adult touch is a bushy and graying beard, the sort sometimes seen on religious zealots who gather in Union Square. He is unfazed by the morbidity of his new view. “Calatrava’s designing the PATH station!” exclaims Oldham, who is prone to exclamations. “It’s going to be so beautiful.” And, indeed, suddenly the whole scene does look almost jolly, like something from a Richard Scarry picture book.
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times “Fela!,” with Sahr Ngaujah sharing the title role as the revolutionary singer....
From Ben Brantly in the New York Times.
There should be dancing in the streets. When you leave the Eugene O’Neill Theater after a performance of “Fela!,” it comes as a shock that the people on the sidewalks are merely walking. Why aren’t they gyrating, swaying, vibrating, in thrall to the force field that you have been living in so ecstatically for the past couple of hours?
The hot (and seriously cool) energy that comes from the musical gospel preached by the title character of “Fela!,” which opened on Monday night, feels as if it could stretch easily to the borders of Manhattan and then across a river or two. Anyone who worried that Bill T. Jones’s singular, sensational show might lose its mojo in transferring to Broadway can relax.
True, this kinetic portrait of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, a Nigerian revolutionary of song, has taken on some starry producers — including Shawn Carter (Jay-Z) and Will and Jada Pinkett Smith — and shed 15 or 20 minutes since it was staged Off Broadway last year. But it has also acquired greater focus, clarity and intensity. In a season dominated by musical retreads and revivals, “Fela!,” which stars the excellent Sahr Ngaujah and Kevin Mambo (alternating in the title role), throbs with a stirring newness that is not to be confused with novelty.
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…
Below is a series of appropriated posters that I painted over and reinstalled into bus stops. These are the first posters to hit the streets in an ongoing experimental campaign to raise cognitive awareness and more importantly to inspire benevolent action that we often forget, oversee, or might be in opposition to our often hedonistic culture. These first batch of posters can be found in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach. More to come. Many more. More…
A typical room at the Thompson LES, a hotel on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that opened last summer, has the look of an industrial-chic loft, with exposed concrete columns, a floor-to-ceiling window and a platform bed. But it’s the room’s art that is most startling: a giant lightbox that floats above the bed. Inside is a photo of a tree from the photographer Lee Friedlander’s “Apples & Olives” series. Seen one way, the art adds a much-needed organic element to the room; seen another, the black-and-white image seems to meld perfectly with the bleak streetscape below.
The forward-thinking placement of art doesn’t stop there. Down in the restaurant, an installation by Peter Halley sets glitzy metallic rectangles against a smoky background. And on the third-floor terrace, three consecutive film stills of Andy Warhol, taken from “Andy Warhol: Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man,” by Gerard Malanga, lie submerged at the bottom of a swimming pool. More…
Paper abstract: Drawing in relational mode emphasises process and tends to be propadeutic, incomplete and provisional. It opens boundaries for interdisciplinary visual arts practices and entails the mapping of points in space deployed through locational mapping strategies involving bodies-in-action. The translation from ideas to open-ended materialisation is crucial to relational drawing. ??Three case studies are presented and analysed. The projects involved play out in particular contexts in Aotearoa New Zealand where they have geopolitical and pedagogical implications. On the periphery of centres of visual arts production, the projects make their own respective impacts and undermine claims to universality within the larger arena of contemporary visual arts production in the world. Through the provisional register of their relational drawing registers the projects enable ongoing negotation through collaborative action and communal learning.
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