If you find yourself at the Museum of Arts and Design this spring, be sure to check out its survey of unsettling quasi-documentary videos by Julika Rudelius, titled What Is on the Outside. The pieces, which were created by Rudelius between 2001 and 2010, range in length from three to 29 minutes, and the complete program will be playing on a continuous loop until July 5.
PARIS — In a recent article on AFC, Paddy Johnson argues that Werner Herzog’s piece in this year’s Whitney Biennial is essentially a throwaway. She sees Herzog’s contribution as a quick fix for inclusion that relies mainly on “bells and whistles” rather than substance. But her account is conspicuously reactionary and seems to be more of a response to the glowing reviews of the art writers she quotes than to Herzog’s work itself.
MoMA’s latest thematic exhibition Print/Out aims to examine the ways printing has expanded and molded contemporary art practice. Is it successful?
CHICAGO — The Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago is currently showing a fascinating series of collaborations between visual artists and writers such as Robert Creeley, Philip Guston, Larry Rivers, Karen Randall and Jim Dine. Poems and Pictures: A Renaissance in the Art of the Book (1946-1981) is a useful and concrete example of the most basic form of interdisciplinary art — combining words and images produced by the highest practitioners of those forms, to observe “the extraordinary occasions when these things and activities fuse, introducing a third element,” as the well-written curator’s essay puts it.
With the hype surrounding the Cindy Sherman blockbuster retrospective on the 6th floor, which critics have almost unanimously praised, I was surprised to find that the most invigorating, exciting and generally mind-blowing exhibition at MoMA right now is Exquisite Corpses.
It’s unlikely, half a century from now, that a shadow oeuvre will appear among the personal effects of many contemporary artists, a secret body of work that parallels or even exceeds their public output. This is what happened with the Dutch painter George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923), whose several thousand photographs emerged from obscurity only in 1961 and might plausibly have been lost forever.
Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, as discussed in last week’s post, was assembled out of discarded body parts — an exhumed limb here, a torso there — with everything “awkwardly sewn into a corporeal pastiche.”
When the list of the 2012 Whitney Biennial artists was made public, it included a very interesting trio of names, probably not immediately recognizable to most of the visual arts world: choreographers Sarah Michelson and Michael Clark, and theater director/playwright Richard Maxwell. All three are extremely well known in their respective fields, but how and why are they relevant to the Biennial audience? Hyperallergic asked me to write a series of articles looking at performing arts, not performance art, in the museum context, and whether it’s an important, or completely arbitrary, shift in visual arts programming.
America is a country of immigrants, and the perspective of foreigners, newcomers and outsiders has always played a large a role in the history of contemporary American photography. Immigrants often have a way of showing us that which we cannot see for ourselves. In keeping with the tradition of outsiders looking in on our culture, a small exhibition on the first floor of the International Center of Photography, titled Perspectives 2012, showcases the work of three non-American photographers — Chien-Chi Chang, Anna Shteynshleyger and Greg Girard — who all focus their cameras on different facets of American life.
The first view of Shura Chernozatonskaya’s work is on the soaring white wall of the Brooklyn Museum’s lobby, spanning over forty feet and high above viewer’s heads. “Domino” (2012) is a painting installation of thirty-three canvasses set-out in a recognizable game formation: a yellow-to-blue chain tic-tacking its way across the threshold to the galleries. Each canvas is marked with approximations of the traffic-light symbol with circles of red/amber/green applied, in glowing transparency, to grounds ranging from pale lemon to deep indigo. Graphically cheerful in tone, the work nonetheless sparks significant cognitive tension. The integration of two distinct pictorially communicative systems, “domino” and “traffic light,” here orchestrates a string of yes/no, stop/go associations in a reception space where viewers’ expectations are strongest. “Domino” is a youthful work. It suggests a brave execution — an exuberant, if harmoniously imperfect, immersion in color and play — and is a fitting symbol to Raw/Cooked, the Museum’s bold new exhibition series of emerging artists of which Chernozatonskaya is the featured third.
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