(Liu Dao) or island6, a Shanghai-based international collective of “multimedia artists, performers, writers, curators and tech-geeks” personify the aspirations of contemporary China by skirting verboten political flashpoints and keeping their content short, sweet, flirtatious, erotic and electronic.
The heart of a society is most open when dealing with death. Its spoken and unspoken fears and hopes, both for life and the afterlife, are embedded in rituals of remembrance and memorial. In China, this has taken the form of detailed objects made of Joss paper that are burned for the deceased.
North Korea is so wacky they have their own calendar system, and it marks its centennial anniversary in 2012, the birthdate of the late Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un’s grandfather. Dovetailing neatly with the recent passing of Übermeister Kim Jong-il, A Postcard From Afar: North Korea From A Distance at Apex Art showcases this mysterious place.
Artists’ Book Not Artists’ Book, as the title suggests, is to explore the fine line between whether a book is an artists’ book or not. It all is more playful than that may sound.
The other day, at a small cocktail party, a literary agent told me that he liked writers who knew and wrote for their audience. Our conversation soon sputtered out because I didn’t see any value in disagreeing with him. A few minutes later, a writer confided that he would keep working on a manuscript only if he could morally, ethically and esthetically justify what he was doing. For each of them the work itself could never be justification enough. It had to appeal to a larger power.
I set out with the intention of seeing these shows, so I wouldn’t call it synchronicity, but the simultaneous exhibitions of David Goerk and Martha Clippinger in the same building, just one floor apart, did get me thinking about art making that is concerned with the realm between painting and sculpture — from della Robbia’s bas reliefs to early modernism (Hans Arp) to contemporary art (Stuart Arends, Ellsworth Kelly, Jim Lee, and Richard Tuttle).
Christophe Laudamiel is not a purist. “I love fabric softener,” asserts the world-renowned perfumer turned high art dissident. While he’s no snob about lowbrow smells, his exhibition Phantosmia – All But the Smell, which opened on Wednesday at the Dillon Gallery in Chelsea, is an olfactory treat.
Phantosmia — or, the sensation of smell without a physical stimulus — features seven unique scent sculptures that intend to christen a new art form.
Before I talk about her exhibition, I want to share an anecdote about the artist. In 1997, June Leaf breezed into my studio at the Vermont Studio Center with a disarming smile from ear to ear. (It was the first time we met.) As she looked over my work, chatting and laughing, she spotted my skateboard in the corner of the room. Before I could say no, the 68-year-old woman proceeded to get up from my desk and stand on my skateboard, gently rolling back and forth. I was in love.
“You do know, don’t you, that even well-meaning people are pawns for the powerful, and when it comes right down to it, humans are best thought of as oversized prawns waiting to be plucked from their beds of ice? Personally, I like to methodically squeeze the plumpest and pinkest ones between my thumb and forefinger, really smooth them out, before swallowing them whole.”
I dreamt that I met the famous and powerful Hollywood gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper. She was tired of lying around in Rose Hill Permanent Rest Stop and wondered if she could get her old job back.
Monica Cook’s Volley features a full cast of blemished bedazzled half-human, half-monkey sculptures. When I asked one viewer what he thought his response was, “It’s pretty dark, I mean, this ain’t no Winnie the Pooh you know …”
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