October 2004 Archive

Rumpole and Eminem

My husband Steve, whose connection with popular culture consists of watching Rumpole of the Bailey videos rented from the neighborhood public library came down to dinner tonight saying he’d just watched the new Eminem video online and he was a big fan of the video — and of Em. Eyebrows went up round the table. In his enthusiasm, Steve downloaded the video for me (it’s at guerillanews.com and I watched it. It’s a good Em video and like all the rap artist’s works, it’s got a point and it’s nicely done. (It’s a get out the vote video with attitude) ... More » »

Pause for the real world

Here are a few shots from yesterday’s John Kerry rally in Philadelphia for those of you who couldn’t make it. If you wondered how they were going to have a rally in Love Park (the announced location for the rally), the answer is that it really wasn’t in Love Park. The speakers’ platform was set up at 17th and the Parkway and the crowd filled the Parkway all the way back to Love Park. (image is crowd looking from Love Park down the Parkway. Green arrow points to Libby and Roberta standing near a jumbotron.) Handmade sign alert: the one ... More » »

So true

Someone complained that we didn’t look much like the picture of ourselves that we had posted on the front page of the blog–you know, the one that was up there for a year-and-a-half showing the two of us, maybe 8 years ago, distributing art on the street (oh, how the truth hurts). As much as our photo may have lied by being a little passe, our paintings lie even more (this is a true confession, just in case you thought we might be realists). Nonetheless, for the next few months, artblog will be carrying in its left-hand masthead details from ... More » »

The German grotesque

Also in the Times, a good Roberta Smith story about two New York exhibits of dark and comic pre-war German art. (read here. lrrfartblog; password: artblog) One of the shows, “Comic Grotesque: Wit and Mockery in German Art, 1870-1940″ at the Neue Museum, caught my eye because it’s curated by Pamela Kort, independent curator who co-curated (with Robert Storr) the wonderful Jorg Immendorff exhibit last year at Moore College. For all our our yards of coverage of that show see Immendorff in our artists’ list at the left. Smith characterizes Kort’s new effort as “a splendidly multimedia revisionist show” and ... More » »

Skypainting a Chinese Landscape

Best picture of the day is in today’s NY Times. It’s a shot of a Cai Guo-Qiang sky painting commissioned by the San Diego Museum of Art. (read story here. user name: lrrfartblog; password: artblog) Cai, based in New York, is known for making art with fireworks explosions. This work which shows mountains and a waterfall, is a different kind of explosive event. This beautiful photo must have been taken at one of the practice runs because the article says that on the day scheduled for the real event, the sky was overcast. The Times ran a picture of the ... More » »

Traipsing down I-95

Well we’re off again. This time to Baltimore for the SPE Conference where we’ll be reviewing portfolios and listening to keynote speaker Nancy Burson discuss her ground-breaking photography which morphed several images into one composite. (image is not us. It’s “First and Second Beauty Composites.” First Composite: Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelley, Sophia Loren, and Marilyn Monroe. Second Composite: Jane Fonda, Jacqueline Bisset, Diane Keaton, Brooke Shields, and Meryl Streep. 1982) We’ll catch you up this weekend.

Bizareness alert!

Post by Jon Coplon Matthew Barney’s video art”Cremaster 3: The Order” is now available on DVD. Not only that, you can rent Cremaster online at netflix. [Ed. note: Rent all the DVDs you want for $17.99 a month, says the website. Cremaster is in the Special Interest category.] Synopsis: as “Cremaster 3: The Order” begins, chaos ensues. A pink, walrus-like protagonist clad in argyle (shown) takes you on an adventure through New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Up and down the ramp he encounters a pink cheetah-woman; two rival punk bands (with mosh pits); the Rockettes and a lone artist (played by ... More » »

Moon crescent, mood Indigo

Post by Matthew Abess Shining through each of Susan Rodriguez’s many works in the exhibit “Stealing Water from the Moon” at Indigo Arts gallery is a distinct interest the mysticism of sensual bonds and interactions. The multi-media works, mostly pastel collages and ink and stamp scrolls, display a deft fusion of varying artistic traditions – French, Tibetan, Indian and Japanese – and reveal the artist’s keen interest in the intrinsic, sacred beauty of the human form. In her pastels, Rodriguez employs bright colors (reminiscent of Matisse’s Fauvism), working into her compositions an aura of sensuality and mystery that is augmented ... More » »

Code green

If you’re on overload from the simplistic approach to the politics that are bombarding us daily on the tv screen, the telephone, the email, and wherever you walk, you might appreciate the delicacy of choices in “The Color Green Exhibition” at the Esther Klein Gallery. The show mostly steers clear of save-the-environment didactics while still touching on green planet issues–and so much more. The 11-artist show has wit, variety, beauty, and deep thoughts, and I’m not talking Jacques Cousteau and the dolphins here. John Dilg‘s oil paintings are greenish monochromes that offer mystery along with their reductive meditations on biomorphic ... More » »

Communication by every means

The three artists in Fleisher Challenge 2 are communicators. They speak loudly, and while I found one of them difficult because of her obvious references to death, something I prefer as a subtext and not the perceived thrust of the work, and another difficult because of the found objects used, I commend them all for trying so hard to be clear about what they’re saying. Hiro Sakaguchi‘s voice is that of the exile in a foreign land. (top image is “Self Portrait” framed in a kind of cellphone) His narrative paintings mix events, words and motifs from the artist’s native ... More » »