Kazuo Ishiguro just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Our contributor, Nancy Chen, had a close encounter with the writer’s oeuvre one summer and writes about how the works affected her. Note, the piece contains some plot spoilers.
Read MoreArtblog’s Nancy Chen reviews Jenny Zhang’s newly published book, “Sour Heart,” a collection of short stories about Chinese American life and family. Born in Shanghai, China and raised in New York, while Zhang’s book is sold as fiction the stories ring true to the experience of Chinese immigrants. Nancy tells us how Zhang confronts model minority stereotypes head on in her writing style and portrayal of Chinese American families.
Read MoreAndrea reviews two recently published books about art made in America over the last 70 years, and shares with us her short list of books she’s eagerly awaiting to be published. The first book she reviews analyzes and debunks common misperceptions about the work of artists from the American Indian Movement. The second book chronicles the many artists living in New York City after the Abstract Expressionist movement, which is the product of a traveling art exhibition first seen at Grey Art Gallery. Though Andrea says, this book “is valuable as considerably more than a catalog to an exhibition.”
Read MoreIn the second part of a two-part series, Andrea reviews two books that tackle the status of performance art in the museum. Intended to be ephemeral, fleeting, time-bound, how does performance art fit in museum collection, which are by their very nature static?
Read MoreAfter fifty years is “Zen for Film” an experience, an object, a projection, or a relic? Holling examines the early history of the work, contemporaneous artworks that raised similar questions, and protocols for institutions that would borrow and exhibit examples from various public collections. Some of Holling’s questions are now being answered by the artist’s estate, museums, and film archives–and they offer inconsistent answers. “Zen for Film,” whose subject is entirely bound with its materiality, raises particularly complex questions, and Holling is thoughtful, dogged, and modest in searching for answers. Her examination raises points common to enough 20th- and 21st-century works that art historians concerned with the record as well as curators and conservators tasked with exhibiting and caring for them will have to acknowledge them.
Read MoreMatthew Rose shares thoughts about performance art, upon reading Marina Abramović’s memoir, “Walk Through Walls.” He reflects on the history of the art form, looking at Marcel Duchamp’s Rrose Selavy, Yves Klein’s “Leap into the Void,” and in the 1970s, Chris Burden’s “Shoot.” Abramović’s endurance performances focus on provocation and trust and, he says, over time they betoken the artist’s persistence as a performer in the public realm.
Read MoreLA is full of oddities, inevitable in a sprawl so expansive and diverse–Halpern’s eye has the ability to make the native seem alien and vice-versa. An image of a smoldering brush fire on a rocky slope, for example, seems pedestrian. Elsewhere, a woman outfitted stylishly in white fur, with jarring, raccoon-eyed makeup seems dropped to earth from space. But, captured in Halpern’s close-up style, she is as believable as the next person on the street.
Read MoreWhy don’t we know about Paula Modersohn-Becker? The book reveals she showed her work but a few times while she was alive, she died young at age 31, and the modernist style and nudes, made in the last year of her life, 1906, were a shock when discovered. No one quite knew what to make of her work. “Greatness” an early critic said; in the same decade of 1910s another said “odd.” This book is the first in English to give a definitive account of her life, exhibition and critical history, and art historical assessment.
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