April 28, 2004
Fred Sandback at Zwirner & Wirth
An Artforum.com review of twin uptown Fred Sandback exhibitions on view through this Saturday. For reasons of timing, it won't be posted online at Artforum's site.
These two shows, which span four decades of Fred Sandback’s career, shed additional light on an artist whose permanent installation at Dia:Beacon has brought fresh and much-deserved attention to his pared-down acrylic yarn sculptures. At Lawrence Markey, one two-stringed sculpture and three preparatory drawings are joined by two atypically expressive mid-1990s drawings on yellow paper. Discovered in the studio after his death last June, these works employ a wider, feathered line made of slightly askew patches of color. Near Zwirner and Wirth’s entrance, a single strand of black yarn stretches diagonally from a corner of the ceiling to the opposite corner of the floor. Sandback’s work forcefully claims maximum space with ultra-minimal means: Though barely visible from the sidewalk, the sculpture both describes and ineluctably alters the space. It is paired with a nearly Constructivist wall design in red, black, and white yarn (created here for the first time, from a proposal made in 1989). The shows, both sensitively installed, are likely the first of many retrospective appreciations and are an excellent model for those to come.
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April 22, 2004
Stephanie Pryor at CRG Gallery
An Artforum.com review of the Stephanie Pryor exhibition at CRG Gallery. The link dies in two months, so here's the full text of the review:
Los Angeles–based artist Stephanie Pryor has reversed course for her second New York solo show, substituting about thirty diminutive, representational acrylic ink paintings on paper for the medium- to large-scale abstractions of her 2001 CRG debut. What unites the two bodies of work is Pryor's technique, which involves multiple watery layers of acrylic; here, the application, subsequent drying, and reapplication of ink washes have significantly wrinkled the paper. The texture gives the works an antiquated quality that reinforces Pryor's pleasantly fusty subject matter. Animal studies—a flock of birds taking flight, a wolf in the forest, and a lion eating its prey—and depictions of elaborately costumed performers on (or near) the stage are interspersed in a single row around the gallery. Several of the actors, isolated against a murky background, appear to be in the midst of private reveries despite their ostensibly public environment. Like Kai Althoff's lanky watercolor dandies, these works channel a quaintly appealing fin de siècle nostalgia.
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April 6, 2004
Peter Wollen on Derek Jarman
On my way home from dinner last night, I picked up a copy of Peter Wollen's Paris Manhattan, his just-published collection of essays on art and film. The four essays I read before bed--on Richter's October 18, 1977 cycle of paintings, Conceptual Art, the Situationists' relationship to architecture, and Derek Jarman's Blue--were of varying quality, the last being the best. There could be several reasons for this: the author has a personal connection to Jarman and is himself a specialist in film/t.v./digital media, subjects he teaches at UCLA; the Richter essay was written for the LRB, a publication to which he frequently contributes, and is therefore necessarily long on the history and sociology of that date and short on Richter's presentation of images from it; I was half asleep while reading the Situationist essay. Either way, the second of three sections in the essay "Blue" is beautiful and worth archiving here. So, the copyright for this extended quote belongs to Peter Wollen. To my mind, this is strong, engaging art history.
Continue reading "Peter Wollen on Derek Jarman"Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
April 5, 2004
Daniel Green on James Wood on John Le Carre
Daniel Green of The Reading Experience analyzes James Wood's review of John Le Carre's Absolute Friends, offering an interesting take on the British literary critic. I'm a fan of Wood's criticism, for reasons that can be summed up as the seemingly "moral" seriousness with which he undertakes his duties, but occasionally cannot stomach his prevarications regarding the merits of the book under review. This review (available online to subscribers only) seems to be a particularly flagrant example of this tendency. Anyway, I'm just using this as an excuse to link to Daniel's weblog as I think he offers the type of commentary on literature that I'd like to think I offer on visual art. Kindred spirits are always to be encouraged.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
What does this say?
A friend that works as an editor at an art magazine pointed out this egregiously bad press release to me:
The exhibition will be comprised of three diptychs from the ongoing series Exquisite Corpse, begun January 1, 1988, and six examples from Homo Faber, the premiere of a suite of recto/verso works on paper and wood.
These two projects pivot on the double in a way that is reminiscent of the split infinitive—an ungrammatical proposition.
Both projects renegotiate allusion, body, continuity, diptych, discontinuity, fashion, figure, frame, genre, geometry, gesture, history, hybrid, index, landscape, making, monochrome, the new, oeuvre, palette, self-portraiture, and still life—among other characteristics and operations—according to disparate logics. The dissolution of "to be" that obtains becomes the occasion for embarkation.
Remember the 1990s British art collective BANK? This text makes me want to resurrect their faxback service. For what it's worth, this text announces the new show of Stephen Prina's work at Friedrich Petzel.
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April 3, 2004
Rubens in Lille; Freud and museum access in London
Several features on the Rubens show in Lille, the centerpiece of the visual arts events organized for that city's turn as European Capital of Culture this year, have popped up in British papers. The Guardian, a consistently strong source of art features and reviews (and one of the few freely available in their entirety on the web) rings in with this feature, while the LRB's Peter Campbell covers the show there. Both have me yearning for my days spent wandering the great European encyclopedic museums last July and August. So too does this profile of Lucian Freud, timed to coincide with an exhibition of new paintings at the Wallace Collection--a place I didn't visit on that trip--which offers this nugget:
Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, has known Freud since, when in charge of the National Gallery, he gave an elite of British painters passes "so they could come in at any time of the day or night. You'd find Lucian in the galleries at one in the morning, two in the morning."
"One of the most instructive experiences of my life was going around with Lucian choosing the pictures for his Artist's Eye exhibition - always between 1 and 3am."
My envy could not be greater. Imagine wandering the Met at all hours. I have a new five-year-plan-type goal: unfettered access to that museum by age thirty. Wish me luck.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Matt Johnson at Taxter & Spengemann
An Artforum.com review of Matt Johnson's debut solo show at Taxter & Spengemann. The link dies in two months, so here's the full text:
Los Angeles artist Matt Johnson's solo debut exhibition of six small sculptures and one photograph highlights a fringe benefit of New York's apartment-galleries: Their intimacy affords young artists the opportunity to show alone without the pressure of having to fill a cavernous Chelsea space. A former student of Charles Ray, Johnson wears his teacher's influence on his sleeve—one could choose worse role models—and translates the modified scale of several of Ray's conceptual witticisms into the tweaked materials of his own. Life's a Beach, 2004, is a sand castle shored up by wood, fiberglass, and epoxy, convincing in its verisimilitude yet durably portable; Breadface, 2004, renders a child's playfully bitten Wonder slice in painted cast plastic. All the works display a sly imagination, but the best is paired with an undercurrent of art-historical awareness (think of Ink Box, 1986, Ray's subversive minimalist cube). Improbably rising from a drinking glass, Johnson's column of faux ice cubes—made of cast urethane plastic stuffed with cotton balls—nods to Brancusi without losing its irreverence or visual appeal.
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