LOS ANGELES — Being different is never easy, more so when you live in an infamously restrictive and conservative Communist Chinese society. Born in a farming village of the Shaanxi province, Xiyadie (a nom de plume meaning “Butterfuly in Siberia”) turns traditional paper-cut art into colorful, risqué pieces dealing with gay love and life.
How do adjacent drawings or photos affect our reading experience as readers? What happens in the mind as we process both words and images? How do both tell a story together?
If there is one constant about Thomas Nozkowski that I would single out, it is his lifelong insistence on subverting conventions. In 1974 he began painting on canvas board measuring 16 by 20 inches. (Let’s be clear here — Bill Jensen never painted on this small a surface because it had no historical precedence). He used an inexpensive, mass-produced product, the same kind that comes in “paint by number” kits and carries associations with “Sunday painters.” No wonder his defiance went largely unnoticed, particularly when the ’80s rolled around.
Dana Schutz, who is in her mid-30s, belongs to the generation of artists who grew up in an epoch where painting was routinely thought of as a dead practice. One couldn’t just be a painter, because doing so would be to enter a dusty domain crammed with empty signifiers. It would mean you were doing something that was obsolete (and reviled) — like speaking Latin to the drugstore cashier. The lines were pretty clear: dumb people became painters; smart people became conceptual artists who painted only when and if the subject called for it. This viewpoint might have started out as speculation, but now it’s a stupid and persistent prejudice.
Jenna Spevack’s current exhibition at Mixed Greens seems take a shot at this popular preoccupation. Eight Extraordinary Greens is part public service announcement, part experiment in farming and part installation.
BravinLee Programs in Chelsea has one of the most eye-popping shows currently on display in the city’s art galleries … and it’s from the man who brought us such cult classics as Blade Runner (1982), Aliens (1986) and Tron (1982).
Davide Quagliola (aka Quayola) an Italian digital artist, loves art. He loves his Roman heritage, brimming with Renaissance and Baroque innuendos. And he loves classical images, and the beauty of the algorithm.
It’s inevitable not to compare the new show at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute to last year’s blockbuster, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, however unfair that might be. But it doesn’t matter, because Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations, a pairing of two disparate designers that gives far too much precedence to the latter, falls flat, regardless of what preceded it.
This past weekend the renovations of Washington Park and the J.J. Byrne Playground outside the Old Stone House in Park Slope were unveiled to a cacophonous crowd of thrilled children and their parents. Fittingly, I was there to see Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space, an exhibit on the second level of the Old Stone House coinciding with the park’s reopening that invited artists to respond to the ideas of bringing play to public spaces while being conscious of community and urban development.
Siglio Press’s anthology of text-based art, It is Almost That, is a rare gem: a book of pivotal works that have received little critical attention. Because of its attention to the obscure, It is Almost That is essential for anyone interested in feminist art, performance studies, cross-genre writing or the graphic novel.
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