If fairs like Frieze draw art and money into uncomfortably close proximity, all that does is state the obvious. To separate them — to pretend that the former can float free of the latter — might appear to be a clean, ethical stance, but that’s a misperception.
So I clicked on Jillian Steinhauer’s post — “Is Marina Abramović Trying to Create a Performance Art Utopia?” — and the first thing that popped into my head was, “Why does it look like a suburban public library, circa 1962?” What I’m talking about is the architectural rendering from none other than OMA’s leading lights, Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, gracing the head of Steinhauer’s article, which was published by Hyperallergic on Monday.
By all accounts, Pearl Blauvelt (1893–1987) was a recluse who lived in northeastern Pennsylvania in a house without running water, plumbing or central heating. Her neighbors referred to her as the “Village Witch.” In the mid 1950s, she was declared incompetent and moved to a facility where she resided until she died. The house she lived in stood vacant for nearly fifty years, until it was bought and restored. The people who bought the house discovered Blauvelt’s drawings in an old wooden box lodged under long-abandoned piles of things.
Whenever I find myself strolling in the hutongs near Gulou and see the entrance of Bed Bar, images of Liang Tao’s 2005 cross-gender performance come to mind. I met her that same year in the 798 art district, just after her performance “Madhouse in Paradise” at Marella Gallery. For that piece she built a replica of a room from a Western mental institution, in which she spent two days as a “perfectly happy” schizophrenic patient. Her point was that, after having spent a period of time in a Chinese mental institution, a Western one would be quite a nice place to live.
Let us start with two addresses just a few blocks from each other in San Francisco, and what was happening there in the early and mid-1950s. On Halloween, 1954, the Six Gallery opened at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco. The six founders were Wally Hedrick, Deborah Remington, Hayward King, David Simpson, John Ryan and Jack Spicer. Their shared interest was to have a place to exhibit art and host literary events, to put art and poetry on the walls, side by side. At the debut exhibition, Spicer’s poems were in fact on the wall, just like the paintings and drawings of the other co-founders.
Artist Gary Stephan, whose new drawings will be exhibited this fall at Devening Projects + Editions in Chicago, is doing the best work of his life.
Once it seemed to matter — the high end, I mean. Art and money, when you put the two words together, would invariably lead to HirstMurakamiKoons unless they were referencing KoonsMurakamiHirst. And the crazy gushes of cash that went their way, and the way they flaunted it, became prime rib for glossy magazines and academic panels alike. But that was so 2007.
Studio portraits do not document an event; the making of the photograph is the event. In order to create a series titled Free Sitting, artist Nora Herting got a job as a trade photographer at a portrait studio in a JC Penney department store in Ohio.
On Thursday, a cache of recently discovered photos taken by the great Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) at the 1960 Democratic National Convention was released by The New York Times.
Before writing about Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s shift from interiors to landscapes, I think it is useful to once again consider the floor paintings, which she worked on for about a decade, beginning in 1967. It is in these paintings that the artist defines an approach to subject matter from which she has never wavered. She will paint only what she observes, but with more rigorous parameters than simply investigating her immediate circumstances. Her subject matter will never suggest an elsewhere or material plenitude. She will make no allusions to fantasy, leisure, or social status. It is incumbent on us to reflect upon what she does and doesn’t do.
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