January 31, 2004
Exhibitions I am glad to have seen
Prompted by my inclusion of Mary Heilman's London show, I realized, given that the web often acts as an archive, it may also be worth pointing viewers to exhibitions I've enjoyed in the past. I suspect that these posts will be very occasional. Nonetheless, here goes:
One of the best exhibitions I saw in Europe this summer was a small thirty-year survey of New York painter Mary Heilman's work at the Vienna Secession. I became particularly enamored of Black Door, 1972, the vertically oriented all-black painting seen in one of the exhibition views toward the bottom of that page. Her playful use of color and mastery of composition is a bit critically disarming; all I wanted to do was roll around in her specially-constructed wooden chairs and gaze happily at the works on view.
The Metropolitan's survey of Vija Celmins's prints (and five drawings) was one of the best shows I saw in 2002. At the time, I was proposing shows for my first-ever review (in Flash Art), and I desperately wanted to write about this one. I lobbied hard, only to be dismissed with the comment: "her work isn't modern enough." I couldn't have disagreed more, and I still regularly look through my Celmins catalogues and delight whenever I come across her work in galleries or museums.
The full-page Artforum ad for Zwirner & Wirth's upcoming Juan Munoz exhibition reminds me how much I enjoyed the traveling museum show organized two years ago by the Art Institute of Chicago, where I saw it, and the Hirshhorn Museum in DC. The placement of his Conversation Piece, 2001, at the southeast entrance to Central Park was a stroke of genius by the Public Art Fund, who normally place relatively innocuous works at that busy site.
Chrissie Iles's splashy Whitney Museum debut was Into the Light, an exhibition about which there is little online information. It was a wonderful show and the book is well worth looking into. Here's the review published in Artforum.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Exhibitions I wish I could see, #2
There is a show of recent paintings by Mary Heilman at the new Hauser & Wirth space in London.
A selection of fifteen recent sculptures and several prints by Martin Puryear is now on view at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. This is a show that originated last year at the Baltic Center in northern England (info here, images here.)
George Shaw, a British painter who has a small work in 'Future Noir,' the current Gorney, Bravin & Lee group exhibition, has a solo show at Dundee Contemporary Arts in Scotland. Flipping through a catalogue at GBL shows his work to be very British, both in atmosphere (drab grayish outdoor scenes that further the stereotype we have of their weather) and in content (many works interrogate class issues), perhaps the reason we haven't seen many of his works Stateside.
Tal R, whose solo show at Victoria Miro earned him a spot on Flash Art magazine's cover earlier this year, is having a solo at Vienna's Bawag Foundation.
What I believe to be the first museum solo show of Irish artist Eva Rothschild (though lumped in with Scottish neoformalist sculptors by virtue of her association with the Modern Institute and affinities with artists like Jim Lambie and Claire Barclay) is now on view at the Kunsthalle Zurich.
This is getting long, so here are a few more links: Donald Judd survey at Tate Modern; David Batchelor at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Ellen Gallagher at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Douglas Fogle's (Walker Art Center) "The Last Picture Show," on view at the UCLA Hammer Museum in its last American venue; and the previously-mentioned-on-this-site "Street Credibility," curated by Mike Kelley, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
A reason to post about Bas Jan Ader
Bas Jan Ader, one of my favorite artists, has had a career renaissance of late. Dead since 1975--he was lost at sea during the second part of a projected three-part artwork called 'In Search of the Miraculous'--his small body of work (no more than forty pieces were made during his truncated career) has lately popped up in group exhibitions in the US and across Europe. This phenomenon is looked at in an extensive article on the artist in the February 2004 issue of Art in America, and is largely credited to the posthumous editioning of his artworks by Patrick Painter Editions, who, along with the artist's widow Mary Sue, shepherd his estate. This is not without controversy, as the article explains at some length. There will be a solo exhibition of Ader's work at London's Modern Art Inc from May 20 to June 27, although I must admit that he doesn't seem to fit so well into the gallery's program (a disconnect made more palpable by noting that the show immediate prior to Ader's will feature Tim Noble and Sue Webster.)
This is all a roundabout way of suggesting that you read the article and, if you're near London, you visit the show. It also offers me the opportunity to point you in the direction of online information about the artist, however scant: the website for an exhibition held several years ago at the UC Riverside Sweeney Art Gallery; the website for a one-man exhibition held last year at the Index Foundation, Stockholm; an article by Bruce Hainley in the March 1999 issue of Artforum; information about the artist on the Galerie Chantal Crousel website, whose Ader exhibition is discussed at length in the Art in America article; and a small website from Otis College of Art & Design, his alma mater.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
"Sodium Dreams" online catalog
The catalogue for Sodium Dreams, an exhibition curated by my friend Elizabeth Fisher for the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Museum, is now online. It was a smart exhibition that introduced me to a number of artists, including Mark Lewis, about whom Elizabeth has written an article for the forthcoming issue of Ten Verses.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
January 24, 2004
"The New Romantics" at Greene Naftali Gallery
No Internet access at home means fewer updates here. I'm still working, of course. Here's proof: an Artforum.com review of a group exhibition currently at Greene Naftali. The link will die two months from now, so here is the text:
Critic Jerry Saltz recently deplored contemporary painters' tendency to faithfully re-create the perspective and spatial depth of their photographic sources. This show, which features five artists who create idiosyncratic imaginary spaces, offers numerous counterexamples. Blake Rayne's two paintings of a statue of James Fenimore Cooper impose shifting pastel planes onto modulated gray surroundings—one wonders if this is how clairvoyants see auras—while Lesley Vance, in her first New York appearance, presents a tour de force: The allover composition of her twelve-foot-wide Foliage, Berries, Moss, 2003, a mélange of human derrieres and verdure, is simultaneously sucked back toward a mysterious light source and seemingly pulled down the canvas by gravity. Nick Mauss's drawings on handmade marbleized paper document his Europhilia as filtered through musical references (London Calling, Stiff Little Fingers) and Jugendstil flourishes. At their best, his works are as delicate as the floral motifs of his Art Nouveau forebears, to whom he is also connected by a sculpture of an oversize peacock feather. And Christian Ward's kitschy, brightly colored paintings of caves might push bad taste just far enough to qualify as pretty good.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
January 13, 2004
Holiday bounty
I have been blessed with reading material in the past month. Here is a list of books that I have either purchased or received since December 23, when I left New York for a week-long vacation in Chicago.
Janet Kraynak, editor. Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman's Words
Slavoj Zizek. The Puppet and the Dwarf
Marc Augé. In the Metro
Brian O'Connor, editor. The Adorno Reader
Lynne Tillman. This Is Not It
Lydia Chukovskaya. The Akhmatova Journals, Vol. 1 (1938-1941)
Michael Ignatieff. Isaiah Berlin: A Life
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
Doug Aitken for Paper Sky magazine
Here is the text of a small feature article on Doug Aitken. It will be published in the next issue of Paper Sky, a quarterly travel-and-culture magazine published in Tokyo and New York. It is my first-ever feature article, and the original drafts read more like a close analysis of the three video installations Aitken presented during autumn 2002 in Philadelphia and New York. Subsequent rewrites tried to add more of the man behind the work, so to speak, and I feel that the tension between review and feature can be seen in the text. It's one of those pieces I wish I had more time to work on, but instructive to look at in the state in which it will forever remain. I remain a fan of interiors, the work shown in Philadelphia, and hope to consider it further at some point in the future.
Continue reading "Doug Aitken for Paper Sky magazine"For the past twelve years, Los Angeles-based Doug Aitken, now in his mid-30s, has made a string of seductively beautiful single- and multi-channel video installations along with films, installations, photographs, sound works, collages, and artist’s books. The varied output is indicative of his complete comfort with the image world: Aitken’s work has taken him to varied locations on five continents. Each time he returns to the studio with footage he begins an editing process that results in a fully resolved artwork loaded with memorable, refined images of the world in motion. Beginning with the completion of inflection, his first video, in 1992, Aitken has exhibited his work at film festivals and art exhibitions around the globe.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
January 12, 2004
The week ahead
Please double-check to confirm dates and times. This subjective list is accurate to the best of my knowledge. Some events require advance tickets. If you have an event you'd like to see listed, please e-mail me with the information.
Continue reading "The week ahead"Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
Why we should talk about Cady Noland
Here are disconnected excerpts from Why We Should Talk About Cady Noland, the first in a series of handmade zines. They cost me eighty-nine cents to make, so if you'd like one, please send me a dollar and two stamps. E-mail me for my mailing adderess.
