Tag Archive "marcel-duchamp"
Dancing Around the Bride at the PMA
Dancing Around the Bride at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA)through Jan. 21, 2013 is an extraordinary, multi-dimensional exploration of a significant period in American art history. While the ideas it presents are hardly new, the sensitive installation, designed by the artist, Philippe Parreno, emphasizes the multi-disciplinary nature of the mutual personal and artistic influences among Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. This is an exhibition as Gesamkunstwerk, and it offers the best, possible understanding of the interconnected, artistic experimentation in New York City in the late 1950s-1960s. Parreno’s installation pivots around a low, platform ... More » »
News post – Recovering from Sandy, Duchamp exhibit opens, Mulhern’s Sea Dice, opportunities and more!
News In the days since Hurricane Sandy’s devastation of the East Coast, thousands of people have been confronted with unimaginable losses. Many of our friends have suffered damage to their homes, their property, and their artwork, as pictures and articles can attest. But as we’ve also seen, people have stepped up to help one another in a variety of ways. Hyperallergic has posted an instructive list of resources for artists, art organizations, museums and collectors affected by the storm, while 20×200 has issued a print benefiting the American Red Cross’s Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts. Our thoughts are with all those impacted by the storm. ... More » »
Art in the Dark part 2 – Janice Kerbel’s Kill the Workers! at Project Arts Centre, Dublin
Project Arts Centre, Dublin, is better known as a performance venue than as a visual arts space (I’m doing my best to change this), but this summer, for the first time, the art moved beyond the gallery to occupy the entire building. The exhibition Conjuring for Beginners (through August 12, 2012) includes eight artists, three of whom inhabited Project’s black box performance space which on this occasion required no house lights. I was particularly taken with Janice Kerbel’s Kill the Workers!; for the many of us unfamiliar with theater jargon, her title is the expression used by lighting crews as ... More » »
Tim Eads’ exuberance confined at Templeton
Tim Eads’ exuberant Species of Spaces feels confined in Rebekah Templeton’s storefront gallery. I like this work. But I wonder how it would blossom in a larger space? I remember an Environment Paul Thek created years ago at Documenta, a room of sand dunes and art and peace and quiet breathing. Stuck in that stupid German city for a week I could instantly re-gain my composure in Thek’s room. Eads’ opening was also a performance which sadly I missed. In Eads’ space one acquires joy. It’s the contraptions. A piano wire strummed by a Jean Tinguely-machine is called Violin and ... More » »
At the National Gallery of Art: Mel Bochner and others
Mel Bochner; In the Tower at the National Gallery of Art (NGA, through April 29, 2012) includes thirty works on paper from the 1960s, most from the group known as Thesaurus portraits, and a room full of recent, large, colorful canvases for which the artist returned to the thesaurus as a starting-point. The use of language and block letters may suggest a conceptual and systematic order and rationality behind these forty years’ work; but dressed up as they are in the protective pedantry of word lists and generic typeface, they instead reflect the personal, idiosyncratic, probing, always intelligent and often ... More » »
Studying the body, not just the figure – Anatomy/Academy at PAFA
With little-seen gems from Philadelphia’s historic scientific institutions, as well as side-by-side art history ground shakers including Thomas Eakins’ Gross Clinic, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (no. 2), and Eadweard Muybridge’s early motion photographs, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art’s new exhibition, Anatomy/Academy, rephrases the dusty argument over the continued importance of human anatomy studies in art education while touching on a number of important sub-topics along the way. Rather than advocating a backwards or stodgy interest in the figure, this exhibition shows how the study of the human body progressed side by side with new technology, and how ... More » »
Alan Riding: On Cultural Life In Nazi-Occupied Paris
When the Nazi army rolled over Paris in late spring, 1940, and occupied the city on June 14, 1940, one might say the lights went out in the world’s greatest cultural beacon. But the truth is more complex, morally and aesthetically, as artists, performers, writers and others in the Paris culture industry either co-existed or collaborated outright with the occupiers. Artists and intellectuals “survived” the war in a fashion, and others, particularly in cinema, enjoyed a “good war.” Sartre famously burnished his war credentials after the Occupation; Picasso was largely selfish and unpolitical; painters Derain and Vlaminck traveled as visiting ... More » »
Are movies the new boudoir art?
Back when royal courts were major art purchasers, painters like Francois Boucher, Rubens and many others got to exercise their sexy muscle on behalf of their royal employers, painting titillating works based on mythology. Many of these erotic paintings (some specifically for the boudoir) now sit in major art museums around the world, a reminder that the erotic in art once had great appeal for patrons who liked a little (or a lot of) sensory pleasure in their paintings and sculpture. As Jonathan Jones said recently about old master paintings in Britain’s National Gallery: “A great painting can be shockingly ... More » »
Reclaiming Women’s Anatomy: The Visible Vagina at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art and David Nolan Gallery
Explicit views of women’s pudenda have never been in short supply in New York City but one found them on 42nd St. (before Disney arrived), not in established art galleries. Inspired by Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues, Francis Naumann began collecting work for an exhibition and when it grew too large, enlisted David Nolan to join him; the exhibition, The Visible Vagina, continues at both galleries through March 20. The results include the entire range of responses one might expect from women to their own most singular parts, and respectful, appreciative study by men of the most mysterious parts of women. ... More » »
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.
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