Tag Archive "new-york"

Liza Lou’s beaded wonderland, a book review

Thirty years after the advent of Pop art, Liza Lou beaded her way into art history, making pop-iconic objects and installations with miraculous numbers of glass beads applied to armatures of plaster, and in some cases, real live things like stoves. Lou labored mightily, and alone at first. Her “Kitchen,” a 168 sq. ft. beaded homage to the domestic took five years to make and 30 million beads (1991-96).

Art fairs–The Russians are coming

We’ve been in New York, looking at contemporary art at the Armory and Volta.  We’ll do a core dump soon but, as a little taste of things to come here’s a photo (with reflections, sorry about that) of a photo we loved by a Russian collective, The Fourth Height, working in collaboration with photographer Urs Bigler. The collective members, pictured here, perform in costume and pose for Bigler in a series called “The Crown.”  If you’re going to Volta, don’t miss it– Pobeda Gallery, Moscow, Booth A4.

Dawn breaks thousands of windows in the city: Poets and Painters in Collaboration at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery

By Thomas Devaney The “Tibor de Nagy Gallery Painter and Poets” exhibition is dream-like. The dream we enter is the salon atmosphere of the gallery’s early days, creating an overall effect of a group portrait of a handful of individuals who reached out to each other through their art. The exhibition reveals how these poets and painters employed numerous strategies to merge into one another’s work while simultaneously shaping their singular creative paths. The enterprising portrait that emerges has been much talked about—and even written about—but has yet, until this retrospective, to be assembled all in one space.

Eric Doeringer – Into the fold

Eric Doeringer is best known for a series of forgeries that he sells on the streets of New York City and yes, in galleries. He calls this series “Bootlegs” because the works are copies of contemporary paintings made famous by all the usual suspects within the art star system. These aesthetic clones have become a type of barometer for contemporary art’s appeal to the random person on the street. Eric can tell you what the public really likes in terms of well-known works of art made in the past fifteen years. The original vs. the copy is often misunderstood and the ... More » »

Chelsea star – Mika Rottenberg’s Squeeze at Mary Boone

We always hope to find a surprise in Chelsea–something we didn’t expect and that knocked our socks off.  We don’t always find it.  But this time we found a star — Mika Rottenberg’s video installation Squeeze at Mary Boone. (Thanks to Diane Burko and Lenore Malen for suggesting this was one not to miss).

William Lamson at The Boiler: A Line Describing the Sun

Two summers back, while I was working as an intern at Pierogi Gallery in Williamsburg, a tall young man with dirty blonde beard came in to show the manager and me a project he was working on. A video on his laptop, turned sideways to accommodate the vertical format, showed himself as he shot down pairs of shoes strung over telephone lines with a bow and arrow. My reaction: “Who is this?” and “Strange.” (Libby and Roberta saw the video at Vox Populi back in 2008). But it was Will Lamson, recognized for videos of quirky performances that engage with the ... More » »

Tunneling in Bushwick: Group Show at Famous Accountants

The current show at Famous Accountants, a dimly lit, but glowing white basement gallery in a Bushwick home, is a disorienting mix of media and technology. The exhibition, Tunneling, is a 13-person group show which covers the theme of tunneling in both its physical/spatial associations and its psychological—“confining, degenerating, myopic” (press release).

New York summer, Part 1 – rooftop tiki bar and bells

Last Friday night Steve, Cate and I ran in to the Whitney Museum to see the Christian Marclay Festival — part exhibition, part performance space and part graffitti-friendly hangout (well, chalk-on-blackboard grafitti anyway). We missed the 7 pm performance but the place was still pretty packed till closing at 9 pm. The museum’s pay what you wish policy on Friday nights is obviously a draw.

Pause for something completely different

Suddenly at the University of Chicago I discovered I could no longer tolerate literary criticism. I had noticed that anthologies of poetry and anthologies of art criticism seemed to have the same authors–Ashbery, Benedikt, Schjeldahl, O’Hara, et cetera–and all these writers seemed to live in New York. So I transferred to Columbia and decided to interview poets for my dissertation. Why not? Sexual Politics by Kate Millet had been a Columbia dissertation.

Rivane Neuenschwander’s viewer interactive art at the New Museum

Go behind-the-scenes of the New Museum's "Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other."