Posts By andrea kirsh
David Page’s Camp X and From Here to There at Rutgers’ Stedman Gallery, Camden
–Andrea’s encounter with a performance succeeds in making her and the other viewers uncomfortable. The performance was part of a now-closed exhibit across the river from Philadelphia in Camden.–the artblog editors———————->Rutgers University’s Camden campus is hidden in plain sight from most Philadelphians, even though it is one stop on the PATCO train from 8th and Market Streets. The faculty exhibition at the university’s Stedman Gallery had a novel format this year. Cyril Reade, Director of the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts (which includes the Stedman Gallery and the Gordon Theater) asked five faculty members from disparate fields to curate an ... More » »
A studio visit with Alexis Granwell
—Multi-media works and some complicated printmaking are under discussion as Andrea visits an artist’s studio.–the artblog editors———————–>Sometimes a single artwork is compelling enough that I want to know more about its maker. At a two-person exhibition at Tiger Strikes Asteroid late last year, I was intrigued by a very large, subtly-layered work on paper that featured an outlined image of a yurt. I could find no clues as to how it was made. When the artist, Alexis Granwell, said it was a print created with multiple intaglio processes, I was startled. Intaglio usually leaves not only a plate mark, but ... More » »
Detouched and Tiny Plays for Ireland at Project Arts Centre, Dublin
—Andrea’s trip to Ireland earlier this year unearthed an exhibit on the idea of touch and some 4-minute (yes, 4-minute!) theater pieces. Her review explains it all.–the artblog editors———————–>Detouched, a group show curated by Anthony Huberman, was on view at Project Arts Centre from Jan. 25 to March 30, 2013. Huberman’s thesis in inventing the neologism, detouched, was that by merging the hand with the machine, contemporary technology generates a detached sense of proximity, or a sense of detouch. The internet may bring us information at one remove. Art almost always does. But successful art conveys the sensation of touch, as ... More » »
Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925, a review of the catalog for the MoMa exhibit
—-Maeve Coudrelle told us about MoMa’s recent Inventing Abstraction exhibit. Here, Andrea presents the catalog for the much written-about and deconstructed show.–The artblog editors ——————————– Leah Dickerman’s re-telling of the beginnings of abstraction within European and American modernism emphasizes the increased communication and availability of travel in the early Twentieth Century and their impact upon the dissemination of artistic ideas. She suggests that rather than having a singular origin with one progenitor (Kandinsky, Kupka, Delauney – take your pick), abstraction was the product of a network of interconnections among artists on both sides of the Atlantic. These cross-fertilizations were among ... More » »
First-rate new book on Paul Klee – a review
Christine Hopfengart and Michael Baumgartner Paul Klee; Life and Work (Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern:2012) ISBN 978-2-7757-3007-5 Paul Klee exhibited with the Blue Rider, taught for years at the Bauhaus in both Weimar and Dessau and had a major retrospective of his work at the National Gallery, Berlin, before he was fifty. Yet his work always stood apart from that of his colleagues. The authors of this first-rate monograph situate Klee’s art in terms of his musical interests, travels, study of other artists, contemporary art movements, and interest in the structure and growth of natural forms. Despite the artist’s avowedly non-political stance, ... More » »
Museum Shopping – Thoughts on Martha Rosler’s Meta Monumental Garage Sale at 21st century MoMA
At a session of the College Art Association annual meeting in February (On the Social, The Relational, and the Participatory…), Martha Rosler spoke about her initial garage sale in 1973, at the gallery of the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, and the many sales she has held since then at art venues in the U.S. and Europe. She showed images of the recent sale, held in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, Nov. 17-30, 2012), which she said was her last. She remarked that it received international press attention, but there was ... More » »
Outsider Art and the Mainstream – A Symposium at the PMA
Outsider Art and the Mainstream was held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) on March 1-2 in conjunction with the opening of Great and Mighty Things; Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection (on view through June 9, 2013). The large exhibition includes more than two hundred works by twenty-seven American artists, all of which have been promised to the museum, making the PMA a significant resource for art that, however uneasily, is generally termed outsider. Whenever artists have tired of the deadening effects of academic art standards, they have looked elsewhere for art that they thought ... More » »
Thematic Exhibitions at the ICA, Grizzly Grizzly and Locks Gallery play with body adornment, materials and art history
White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart at the ICA Self-adornment is surely homo sapiens’ first art form: body painting, scarification, tattooing. Garments that offer anything more than basic protection from the elements or environment can be said to participate in that tradition. White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania, through July 28 takes a broad, and as the title’s reference to Ovid suggests, rather poetic view of the subject. The exhibition, curated by Anthony Elms, makes no distinction between attire that was worn (RAMMΣLLZΣΣ) and clothing forms meant to be exhibited ... More » »
Memories of buildings at NYU’s 80 WSE Gallery and Orhan Pamuk’s book The Innocence of Objects
Four Houses, Some Buildings and Other Spaces, an exhibition curated by Berta Sichel at NYU’s 80 WSE Gallery through March 16 brings together ten artists (or artists-collaborations) around the ideals and memories invested in buildings, other man-made structures, and their remains. They investigate the subjects of who determines the built environment, who establishes its meaning, who tells its history, and which of multiple histories are preserved. The story they tell is complex, nuanced and provocative, without being tendentious. The artists, from Europe, North and South America, are primarily interested in buildings as bearers of ideas – either those of their ... More » »
Manon de Boer’s film Trilogy at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with live programs this weekend
What do a Dutch actress best known for her performance in a soft-core porn film that was distributed in mainstream venues, a French-educated, Brazilian psychoanalyst interested in trauma, and an American interpreter of avant garde percussion music have in common? Is that even a worthwhile question to ask about the women who are the subjects of Manon de Boer’s Resonating Surfaces – A Trilogy, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), extended through May 5, with additional live programming this weekend. The Dutch actress, Sylvia Kristel, who gained a world-wide reputation for her role as Emmanuelle in the ... More » »
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