Friday May 13th, 2011
Filed under Reviews, Spring 2011
by Collin Sundt
Makota Aida, "Harakiri School Girls" (2002). Print on transparency film, holographic film, acrylic, 46 3/4 by 33 3/8 inches. Courtesy Japan Society..
Desperate times call for desperate measures. In his abortive 1970 small-scale coup d’état, lost in his own sensationalism, Yukio Mishima pleaded for the soul of Japan.
The writer condemned the American-style constitution–weakness imposed from abroad–and the gutting of tradition through the shedding of the imperial divinity. In post-war decrees, Mishima saw the Japanese identity ebbing away in a tide of Americanization–a nation reduced to international groveling and mindless consumption. Although his subsequent dramatic suicide ensured him a place in the tradition of nationalist martyrs, he had little support in even the literary world, and his message was destined to fall upon deaf ears. Lost in cozy corporate interdependencies and the unsustainable exponential growth of the post-war “miracle” economy, few heeded the writer’s plea.
Continue reading…
Wednesday May 11th, 2011
Filed under Reviews, Spring 2011
by Lee Ann Norman
Glenn Ligon, "Ruckenfigur" (2009). Neon and paint, 24 by 145 inches. Courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art.
“AMERICA,” Glen Ligon’s first mid-career retrospective, reveals, in just over 100 works, his strength in making art that confidently lives in the space of in between. His work is strangely accessible and familiar; perhaps it is his use of text, his wry humor, or the air of unassuming intensity he radiates. He effectively lightens weighty subjects without diminishing their significance, and his penchant for having hard conversations without saying a word gives his work a suppleness that easily slides between the mordant and temperate.
Continue reading…
Tuesday May 10th, 2011
Filed under Reviews, Spring 2011, Uncategorized
by Nayun Lee
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, "T.1912" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, August 14, 2011
The French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster turned the Guggenheim Museum into a sinking Titanic on the evening of April 14th. The day was the 99th anniversary of the tragedy, which took 1,517 lives. “T.1912” was a site-specific performance, which was perfectly synchronized with the museum’s structure, and included the Wordless Music Orchestra, lighting and audience participation.
Continue reading…
Tuesday May 10th, 2011
Filed under Reviews, Spring 2011, Uncategorized
by Diana Seo Hyung Lee
Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript, translated by Thomas Ford
New York: Verso, 2010.
160 pages, $19.95
Boris Groys remarks in The Communist Postscript (first published in German in 2006 and translated into English in 2010) that we in the West condemn communism for turning humans into “automata” and “machines.” He writes, “In Western films dating from the Cold War in which communists from the East are represented, it is striking that communists generally appear as robots, as specters, as inhuman, internally empty, bodiless machines.”.
Continue reading…
Sunday April 17th, 2011
Filed under Reviews, Spring 2011, Uncategorized
by Alex Allenchey
Kazimir Malevich, "Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying" (1915). Oil on canvas, 22 7/8 by 19 inches. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
The newest exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, “Malevich and the American Legacy,” is an extravagant attempt that achieves only modest results.
In an effort to demonstrate the far-reaching influence of the Russian Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich, the show surrounds six of his major paintings with a variety of works by modern and contemporary American artists. Curators Andrea Crane and Ealan Wingate have loosely defined the term “legacy” in the exhibition’s title, incorporating a number of works that share only a small degree of formal or conceptual relation to Malevich’s paintings. Though this inclusionary approach allows the show to feature an impressive collection of artists such as Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Donald Judd and Richard Serra, to name only a few, the diversity of the exhibition serves as a detriment to its overall success. By increasing the number of possible Malevich comparisons, the show also lessens the consistency of compelling connections.
Continue reading…
Tuesday April 12th, 2011
Filed under Reviews, Spring 2011, Uncategorized
by Noah Dillon
Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century
ed. Steven Henry Madoff
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009
384 pages, $32.95
Despite its faults, Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century is spectacular. Edited by Steven Henry Madoff, the anthology captures representatives of every point in the art school matrix: students and teachers, theorists, critics, curators, and so on. There are great contributions from older educators as well as neophytes. The disagreement among its authors is entertaining and challenging. Questions concerning Ph.D. studio programs, the role of interdisciplinary research, and the theory/practice divide are given several contradicting answers, and yet satisfy.
Continue reading…
Sunday April 3rd, 2011
Filed under Reviews, Spring 2011
by Margaret Graham
Courtesy Alexander and Bonin Gallery.
The sculptures, mixed media, and installation works of Mona Hatoum at Alexander and Bonin; Pat Steir’s metallic paintings at Cheim & Read; and Terence Koh’s ritualistic performance piece at Mary Boone Gallery have something in common. For each of these artists, distance—both as an artistic concept and a personal malaise—is made tangible, transformed from an abstraction to something visceral, disquieting, and unequivocal.
Continue reading…
Wednesday March 9th, 2011
Filed under Reviews, Spring 2011, Uncategorized
by Kareem Estefan
For more than a decade, the DJ has been hailed as the artist most in tune with the streets, in sync with the rhythms of global life, and in advance of the latest technologies. Every cultural worker, from the poet to the filmmaker to the philosopher, claims to be a kind of DJ, employing the diverse montage strategies of the 20th century, whether they are called collage or bricolage, appropriation or sampling, plunderphonics, plagiarism, or détournement. In the mid-1990s, the DJ’s celebrity ascended from the basement clubs of Detroit, Manchester, and Berlin onto the world stage with the rise of digital technologies and the Internet, and in no small part, because of a brilliantly talented turntablist and conceptual artist named Christian Marclay.
Continue reading…
Wednesday March 9th, 2011
Filed under Spring 2011
by Caroline Dumalin
Installation view, "112 Greene Street: The Early Years" courtesy David Zwirner gallery
Well before the boom in artists’ initiatives in the mid 1970s, Jeffrey Lew founded 112 Greene Street in the fall of 1970. Taking its name from its location in the burgeoning SoHo community, the freeform venue was mainly led by the experimental and improvisatory drive of the artists involved, among whom key figures are Gordon Matta-Clark, Tina Girouard, Suzanne Harris, Jene Highstein, Larry Miller, Richard Nonas, and Alan Saret. The 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970-1974) exhibition at the David Zwirner Gallery delivered a fragmentary and trouble-free account of this pioneering “creative laboratory.” The governing “anything goes” attitude was reflected in the aesthetic of the selected works — from patterned fabrics, stenciled wallpaper, found photographs, rotting edibles, architectural rubble, floral drawings, and folded chicken wire to an elaborately staged performance video by Richard Serra.
Continue reading…