October 2009 Archive

Toronto – sweet digital dreams of Alex McLeod

We got an email from an artist in Toronto recently. Alex McLeod, 25, was alerting us to his website and wanted some feedback. We both took a look at the digitally-rendered landscapes and were wowed by the super seductive colors, textures and spaces in what looked to be a dystopic Second Life world with weird architecture and even weirder nature (clouds that hang heavy as cow’s udders and air that seems to rise like bubbles in a fish tank, etc.).   These pretty, fragile worlds are a puzzle.  Is this an eco-disaster fueled art; is it post-apocalpytic; sheer fantasy?  The ... More » »

Weekly Update – Malcolm McLaren talks about video, art and his past

This week’s Weekly has my interview with Malcolm Mclaren, whose video Shallow 1-21 opens this week at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ Morris Gallery.  Below is my copy with some pictures. Before he became the godfather of punk Malcolm Mclaren — founder and manager of the Sex Pistols — was an art student and a mischief-maker.  Mclaren’s new video at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts proves he’s still out to make trouble as well as art.

Gorky at PMA–an artist ahead of the curve

The Gorky retrospective that opens tomorrow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is an eye-opener–one of those exhibits that shows the artist as a thinker, working out problems and solving them. To see the drawings (and the gorgeous and bold handling of line in them)–sometimes multiple drawings–preparatory to paintings is wondrous, at once belying the idea that the paintings are casual and improvisatory abstractionist expressions and belying the idea that the paintings are static reproductions of the drawing ideas.

Treasures of Ancient Iraq: Rediscovering Ur’s Royal Cemetery at the Penn Museum

Iraq has been front-page news for years and the Holy Crescent is central to Jewish and Christian scripture, so it’s surprising that some of the greatest treasures excavated there have been sitting in Philadelphia since the early 20th Century and been relatively ignored.  The British Museum’s spectacular goat of lapis lazuli caught in a thicket of gold has a twin at the Penn Museum.

artblog contributor Stefan on the Montreal airwaves!

Longtime Montreal blogger, Zeke, interviewed our man in Montreal, Stefan Zebrowski-Rubin about the scene up there. There’s a podcast at Zeke’s blog…plus artblog gets a huge shout-out at the beginning!!!  We remember Zeke when he was organizing bloggers around the world back in 2004 or 2005 for a Canada confab. Check out Stefan’s last post about Carl Jung’s red book.   We love that Jung made his own mandalas to illustrate the book.  Om.

Carl Jung’s Red Book at the Rubin Museum of Art

Waking from wild and fantastical dreams, I try my hardest to write down all their details, attempting to unveil the hidden meaning within for myself. Yet, if I had lived before the 20th century, I may have been revolted and troubled by the images conjured up during sleep. In the early 20th century, Carl Jung revolutionized the world of psychology by founding analytical psychotherapy, pioneering the idea that the exploration of the psyche, including dreams, could lead to greater self-understanding.  It is little wonder that the man himself attempted to make sense of his own interior world through what he ... More » »

San Francisco street art — scatology meets religion

Steve, who just returned from California, saw this piece of street art outside a church in San Francisco.  To say that Steve is not religious is like saying the Pope is Catholic.  Anyway, Steve’s been using this particular phrase about the Pope for years.  We think his use dates to the Pope’s trip to New Orleans in 1987, a time when our friends Chuck and Iris lived there, and we had some funny back and forths about the Pope relating to the irreverent Pope products they were seeing around NOLA (Pope-alope pictures; Pope soap on a rope).  This street art ... More » »

Vermeer and Paine at the Met, Blake at the Morgan and more

Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid at the Met (up to Nov. 29) is the kind of show the Barnes could do when it’s all moved in to the Parkway in a couple years. The show is a deep, comprehensive exploration of a work of art that also teaches a lesson about the Netherlands and other artists working at the time. The Met borrowed The Milkmaid from the Rijksmuseum and surrounded it with works by Vermeer from its own collection. Then it added Dutch genre paintings from the era that were not by Vermeer. The wall texts explain the symbolism of the ... More » »

Totems! fabrics! bodies! at University City Arts League

The shamanistic power of totems is transformed in the art of three women exhibiting this month at the University City Arts League. Drawing on methods and materials that belong to women’s craft practices and exploring the relationship of bodies to clothing, the three have created armor and stand-ins for the female body that are imbued with magical forces to be reckoned with.

Talking with the art czar

We had a chat with Gary Steuer last month in his 7th floor office in City Hall. The art czar’s desk is in a cubicle next to his assistant’s in a small North-facing office down a dark corridor. But Steuer has a sweet little conference room with a window overlooking the Masonic Temple on North Broad St. In fact, it’s the room that might have been his private office if he had wanted it. He decided he’d rather have a cubicle and a real (albeit mini) conference room instead. It was the kind of practical “let’s make something out of ... More » »

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