talks
College Art Association Annual Meeting in Chicago; random thoughts
The plane to Chicago for the College Art Association (CAA) Annual Meeting left from a concourse I rarely use so I saw different art than usual as part of the airport’s Exhibition Program, which certainly provides the best distraction I’ve found at Philadelphia International Airport. Nick Kripal’s Swarm was a terra cotta landscape of an alternative, multi-culti character with forms cribbed from the kitchen cabinets; what looked like a Moorish dome turned out to have been cast from a pudding mold! I’d love to see him do animations based on them.
Events in Philadelphia and Elsewhere
An incomplete, biased and otherwise personal list of some of the events I hope to get to in the next two weeks: Tuesday, Feb. 2, 6 pm YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, a Seoul based web-art group, will be speaking at Temple where their work is part of Philagrafika. 126 AUDITORIUM, Temple University Architecture building, 1947 North 12th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122 Free and open to the public Who wouldn’t want to hear from artists who did a web piece called CUNNILINGUS IN N0RTH K0REA? You can see it, and more of their work at their site.
Temple Philagrafika talk 2-5 today
I’m dashing toff to Temple Gallery for the artist’s talk inconjunction with the Philagrafika show there. The talk, featuring artists Carl Pope, Frencesc Ruiz, Barthelemy Toguo and YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, plus Curators Sheryl Conkelton and Jose Roca, sounds pretty interesting.
“Incarnational Aesthetics” in New York and Cool Conversations around Barkley Hendricks at PAFA
Jenny Jasky is Philadelphia’s loss and New York’s gain; she recently moved and already found an outlet, curating an exhibition at NYCAMS (New York Center for Art and Media Studies) with Stamatina Gregory. Incarnational Aesthetics (Oct. 24-November 25, 2009) is one of those idea-driven exhibitions where I found the work provocative but couldn’t entirely reconcile it with the curators’ statement: to showcase artists who use embodiment or ‘role play’ in their work as a means of interrogating and deconstructing the public and private boundaries between self and other.
Étant donnés: Duchamp, the crowds will come
Duchamp studies are a thriving industry in academe and his work continues to have a major influence on artists, so it was no surprise that the first annual Anne d’Harnoncourt Memorial Symposium at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), devoted to Duchamp’s final work, would attract a full house. The enthusiasm was such that by 10 am on Saturday morning (Sept. 12) the audience was seated and expectantly quiet.
Michael Taylor tells all–a talk on Etant Donnes
Marcel Duchamp’s final masterpiece Étant Donnés at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is an art historical conundrum, inviting speculation, adoration, revulsion and religious pilgrimages, sometimes all of these reactions at once. The peephole installation, which permanently resides in the Philadelphia Museum of Art is a reclining nude, legs splayed for a nearly full-Monty view, the figure nestled on foliage in a 2- and 3-D landscape diorama with a mechanized waterfall. Not surprisingly, it invites comparison not just to Dejeuner sur L’herbe and all the other art historical nudes, but also to an inflatable sex doll!
Philadelphia and its Manufactures— Jacob Hellman, Phillip Taylor
August 20th, Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction.– Pretty tickled by this presentation. Jacob [i.e. speaker Jacob Hellman] and I have, on numerous occasions, swapped ideas on the arcane beauty of both former Philadelphian industry and its currently-aching hell-neighborhoods. But rather than getting lost in the mythos and delirium, as I always have, Jacob remained admirably embedded in the history of it all; drawing from research, anecdotes, and his definitive resource, Philadelphia and its Manufactures, by Edwin T. Freedley.
Help from the Computer Lab
It’s not often that I find myself heading for lectures sponsored by applied mathematicians, but last Spring I went to the Math department at the University of Pennsylvania to hear David Stork talk about the usefulness of computer modeling for art historians.
Gilbert and George on politics and Union Jacks
In 2007, Gilbert & George mounted a massive retrospective at the Tate Modern that included “Mullah.” The tremendous work (2.42 x 2.02m) from 1980, featured a stone-faced icon seemingly cast from the Magic Forest. Composed of photographs of cut planks of wood (knots for eyes, nose and mouth) and collaged together in Gilbert & George’s signature multi-panel digital print in black and white, the work seems prescient these days as “mullah” gains traction across the Internet following the violent crackdown on the post-election street demonstrations in Iran.
Good reads in the Inky and Times
Yesterday was a red letter day in art writing in the print media. The New York Times ran a terrific article, Framing the Message of a Generation by Holland Carter, comparing two exhibits, “The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” at the New Museum. What seduced me was his lead on how some work gets canonized, other work not. But then he went on to discuss the whole idea of dividing art by age and how the two shows succeed and fail at this.
