“Everybody ought to go careful in a city like this,” Joseph Cotten’s character Holly Martins is warned in The Third Man, the classic 1949 film noir that takes place in a war fractured Vienna. The line came into my head while viewing the photographs in Weegee: Murder is My Business at the International Center of Photography (ICP), where corpse after splayed corpse was flashbulb lit on the New York streets, crowds watching in curiousity or strange amusement while lantern-jawed police officers and a fedora-wearing photographer analyzed the scene.
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CHICAGO — Is Chicago an artistic center on the same level as New York, London or LA? Is there an identifiable “Chicago school,” in the same way as the school of Paris or the post-war art movements in Manhattan? Does Chicago produce “famous” artists and artists worthy of greater fame?
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BOONE, NORTH CAROLINA — The Rembrandt in America show at the North Carolina Museum of Art is the largest Rembrandt show ever staged in America, containing 47 works.
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CAPE TOWN — What do Ghanaian photographer James Barnor, local Simonstown painter Peter Clarke, British superstar artist Richard Long and Russian World War II posters have in common? Aside from a show at the South African National Gallery, it seems nothing at all.
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IRVINE, California – There is a call for Jews to return to Poland — and it’s coming out of Irvine. Well, actually it’s coming from Israeli artist Yael Bartana, whose trilogy … and Europe Will Be Stunned, which occupied the Polish pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, is currently having its American debut at the University Art Gallery at UC Irvine. The videos present the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), which calls for the return of Jews to Poland to reconstitute the country as it was and make it whole again.
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Who decides what is and what is not beautiful? To address these questions, Berthold Ecker, Claude Grunitzky and Andreas Stadler, the curators of Beauty Contest at the Austrian Cultural Forum and MUSA, selected 20 internationally acclaimed artist who grapple with society’s obsession and fascination with physical appearance.
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CHICAGO — In a darkened gallery in the Art Institute of Chicago, a grainy video from decades ago begins. Standing with her face pressed up against a white wall, a woman reaches down and scoops up a handful of red, viscous liquid — presumably blood — from an enamel tray, and in a series of arcing gestures she traces a crude outline of a doorway, or a cave entrance, or maybe just the close demarcation of her own small body, around herself onto the wall.
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One of the most difficult things to evoke in an art show is a snapshot of a culture. On the other hand, when I write about zines, I find it difficult to separate the object itself from the ephemeral culture that surrounds it. In Samizdat: The Czech Art of Resistance, 1968-1989, curator Daniela Sneppova brings American viewers in to the heart of a print-based resistance.
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Something about Tibet has always seemed very mysterious to the West. Maybe it’s the terrain of the towering Himalayas possibly inhabited by savage yetis, the legends of the heavenly Shangri-La, or the ancient traditions of Tibetan Buddhism embodied by the reincarnated Dalai Lama. All of these impressions, founded on fact or not, have naturally made for great comic book fodder, where the exotic and mystical image of Tibet fits in perfectly with superheroes and mad villains. The Rubin Museum of Art’s Hero, Villain, Yeti: Tibet in Comics is now presenting over 50 comics related to Tibet dating back to the 1940s.
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During a brief two-week run, Storefront for Art and Architecture was transformed into a laboratory by the creative team of Harrison Atelier (HAt) in their latest iteration of dance-installation titled Pharmacophore: Architectural Placebo. Conceived, dramaturged, directed and designed by the husband and wife team of Seth Harrison and Ariane Lourie Harrison the project explores “the cultural and philosophical economy that surrounds medicine, technology, and the human prospect.” Quite a heady agenda.
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