August 31, 2004
Lines I wish I wrote, #2
In a review of Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists in the September issue of Frieze, Tom Morton writes:
The cover image of Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists, the catalogue of a does-exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin show curated by Matthew Higgs at San Francisco's CCA Wattis Institute earlier this year, is frankly a little terrifying. In a photograph by Helen Cantrell, the artist Mary Kelly lounges by a pool in a pink vest top, looking for all the world like an Annie Liebovitz-snapped Beverly Hills starlet. Only Kelly's hands, which seem poised for a karate-chopping act of critical deconstruction, and her hair, which is pinned up in a huge bun resembling an auxiliary brain, serve as reminders of her noted austerity.
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
August 28, 2004
A step in the right direction, a step aside
I tried to ease my way further into the realm of fiction by reading The Book Against God, the debut novel by literary critic James Wood. I am in awe of the analytical power and bristling prose of his essays, so I should be equally enamored of his novel, right? Almost. Its protagonist is a depiction of what I fear myself becoming, and as he is mired deeper and deeper in his problems during the course of the book, I was more and more intolerant of the book itself. I should know better than to make one-to-one connections between character and book—I'm certainly able to make a similar distinction when looking at art—but I'm not yet that adept a fiction reader. So I underlined triusms and fabulous turns of phrase ("...we can't schedule the consequences of our lies"; about the narrator's parents: "And though they drank tea every night, from the same art deco cups and saucers, the event seemed to give them the same pleasure every night; there was no death by repetition in their marriage, quite the opposite, it was as if only by repetition they knew the exact weight of everything"; "...I looked at Terry's hands, broad with earthy seams"; describing a church organ: "the organ sounded—beautiful, that silver dapple of complicated breath through a thousand mouths") and am now back to the realm of non-fiction, with Jeffrey Steingarten's It Must've Been Something I Ate.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
August 26, 2004
Images of Santiago Cucullu project at UCLA
Julia Friedman has posted a few images of Santiago Cucullu's "Hammer Projects" exhibition now on view in Los Angeles. These are the first pictures I've seen of the work I wrote about for the brochure essay.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
August 24, 2004
Nicholson Baker
While the blogging world is all in a huff about Nicholson Baker's new novel Checkpoint (and Leon Wieseltier's review in the NYTBR), may I take a moment to express my disappointment in A Box of Matches, his last effort? Walter Kirn, also in the NYTBR, wrote: "“Wonderful. . . . An opportunity for heightened mindfulness. . . . Baker has made an astonishing specialty of showing just how much is going on in life, and in our heads, when it seems that nothing is.” I'm all for excavations of the everyday, but the problem is that a lot of what is going on in life, and in our heads, is not inherently interesting; it requires a mix of illuminating insight and scrupulous description to raise it to a level worth publishing. Sadly, Baker's book—with its attention to details like pulling aside one butt cheek to silence an impending fart—doesn't succeed. Perhaps I read so little fiction that I'm especially hard on what I do pick up. Maybe I ought to stick with the classics. Any recommendations?
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
August 22, 2004
"Hard Light" at P. S. 1
My brief review of "Hard Light," now on view at P.S.1, has just been posted at Artforum.com. Click here to see it at the Artforum site or here to see it archived at BrianSholis.com.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
August 13, 2004
Roni Horn at the Art Institute of Chicago
My brief review of Roni Horn's exhibition "Some Thames" at The Art Institute of Chicago was just published online at Artforum.com. Click here to see it there, or here, where it is now archived at BrianSholis.com.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
August 9, 2004
Amie Dicke essay for artist's catalog
An essay I wrote about the Dutch artist Amie Dicke's cutouts is now online at BrianSholis.com. Click here to read the full text. Below is an excerpt:
These works slyly combine the artist's earlier Nauman-esque sculptural casts of negative spaces surrounding her body with her vertically oriented, scroll-like ink drawings of faces connected by webs of thin lines. Dicke retains an interest in presence and absence, solids and voids: in each cutout, large swaths of the models' bodies and of decorative background elements are excised; likewise she uses black ink to selectively cover over colors and other compositional elements. She concentrates on form, and what remains of each fashion image is a network of filigreed lines that calls to mind veins, lace, or wax drippings from devotional candles. Like the earlier sculptures, cast in sugar and icing and prone to decay under the hot lights in a gallery, the cutouts seem affected by gravity, as if they were sagging down the wall. This is especially true of cutouts like Estee (2001), the first cutout to which Dicke applied ink; its contours economically signify the shape of a face but it is one that appears to be melting away. There is a subtle violence in the work, as the dripping lines emanate from the anonymous model's eyes, nostrils, and mouth, perhaps signifying tears and blood; the latter is emphasized by a touch of bright red lipstick left in the composition. The small patch of color on the lips is found in all of Dicke's early cutouts. It is the only trace of beauty among the ruins made of the original images, a life-affirming blush of health among the decay.
These initial, intimately scaled portraits, often titled only with a woman's first name, focused solely on models' faces. But “my work is all about the body,” declared an early artist's statement, and Dicke has recently incorporated the rest of the models' bodies into her compositions. The tentativeness of the first cutouts has been supplanted by self-confidence—almost aggressiveness—both in the poses of the models selected for use and the complexity of the cutting enacted upon them.
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August 7, 2004
Short essay about Christine Hill
Here is the text of a short essay I wrote for the debut issue of Work magazine. The article is also archived here on BrianSholis.com.
It’s by design that Brooklyn-based Christine Hill is seated behind a desk in the accompanying photo. An unusual theme among contemporary artists, “work” is both subject and object of Hill’s multifaceted practice. Over the past dozen years, she has assumed the role of receptionist, shopkeeper, rock star, street cleaner, lecturer, tour guide, television talk show host, and—all along the way—archivist, pursuing a defiantly individualist path through an art world that hasn’t always known what to make of her.
Since 1996, Hill’s efforts have taken place under the rubric of Volksboutique, which started in East Berlin as a secondhand shop-slash-social space and now operates as an “organizational venture,” incorporated in Germany and New York State. What unites these disparate activities, along with the Volksboutique name, is a disciplined, self-sufficient, and hands-on approach: the artist is involved in all aspects of her productions, no matter the scale. She is a rigorous organizer, assiduous recycler, and unfaltering performer. She is also meticulous about aesthetics, and has developed a mix of 1950s American corporate optimism (“Make the most of what you’ve got!” reads one poster) and 1970s East German industrial functionality, both curiously filtered through a DIY sensibility whose implements include lots of rubber stamps and antiquated machinery.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, conceptual artists dematerialized the art object— to borrow the phrase coined by Lucy Lippard, who has also written about Hill— and Volksboutique is a significant furthering of that investigation, wherein the “work” is not only a noun (the object), but also a verb (the act of making). For Hill, the two are as inseparable as “life” and “art,” and gallery visitors will almost invariably find Hill working full-time in her exhibition spaces, preparing for her next project while the current one is on view. Such was the case with “Home Office,” her autumn 2003 solo exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York. The central objects of the exhibition were Portable Office Prototypes: a collection of five custom-designed faux-antique steamer trunks, each outfitted with the accoutrements necessary for Hill to execute different tasks (reception, accounting, public relations, production, and management) in her one-woman enterprise. Appropriate outfits, desk accessories, and nametags accompanied each persona. She conducted business in the front room while exhibition documentation and an array of models for future projects filled the other. My first meeting with the artist (as Christine E. Hill, office manager) was at this desk; appropriately, I had an appointment.
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August 1, 2004
Santiago Cucullu essay for Hammer Museum
The essay I've written for Santiago Cucullu's upcoming Hammer Projects exhibition in Los Angeles is now online at www.BrianSholis.com. Click here to read it.
I'm going back to New York later today. Expect more updates soon!