When an exhibition is as puzzling as this one, it’s useful to step aside and reflect.
Dan Flavin
Posted inArt
A Mega-Gallery Marks a Quarter Century
I remember David Zwirner Gallery back in the 1990s, before Chelsea, when the New York art world was much smaller and more manageable.
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All in the Smooth, White, Vacant-Eyed Family of Contemporary Figurative Sculpture
PHILADELPHIA — Once upon a time, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, there lived a family of sculptures. They were all smooth, white, and vacant-eyed.
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Contemplating Perfection and Imperfection at Dia:Beacon
A visit last weekend to Dia:Beacon, the vast repository of Minimalist art on the east bank of the Hudson River, brought home once more the complexities and contradictions of a movement whose goal was to be as plain as the nose on your face.
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9 Minimalist Boxes for Boxing Day
Boxing Day is a holiday celebrated by aesthetes the world over. In order to purify ourselves after the rampant commercialism and visual over-stimulation of the past month, we devote this day to the solemn contemplation of square and rectangular Minimalist sculptures.
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Keith Sonnier’s Tactile Formulations in Neon and Glass
Relatively speaking, Keith Sonnier’s interest in the connections between nature and technology has a long history. His early minimal-style, classical neons from 1968–1970 have a highly reductive, classical, nearly stoic appearance. The more recent formulations, though extravagantly tactile, were less evident in the beginning.
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Neon Visions at the End of Long Island
There was a time, before collectors, parties, fairs, and celebrities, when artists were drawn to the tranquility and beauty of the Hamptons, the sense of community that could be created there. One of those artists was Dan Flavin, who began spending his summers in Bridgehampton in 1972 and bought a house in nearby Wainscott in 1980.
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Inside the Light: James Turrell in LA
LOS ANGELES — Nothing about Turrell is standard. And everything about his work seems impossible.
Posted inOpinion
5 Artists Who Anticipated Festivus
Happy Festivus everyone! What is Festivus? It is a secular holiday celebrated on December 23 as a way to celebrate the holiday season without participating in its pressures and commercialism. It was popularized by Seinfeld.
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Making Fun of Minimalism in Two Chelsea Galleries, Pt. 1
Could it be that the slick surfaces and lustrous finish fetish of high minimalism isn’t exactly suitable for the current atmosphere of economic austerity measures? Along with the painful recession consequences of mass job loss, gallery closings and the bloody fight over British arts funding cuts has come a suspicion of entities too big to fail: the black boxes of big banks and even bigger corporations. Taking this to the art world, I’ve been noticing an artistic suspicion of the hermetic perfection so glorified by minimalists like Donald Judd and Anne Truitt. Two current Chelsea exhibitions show artists taking down modernism and minimalism’s cold self-seriousness with the movement’s own weapons. In this first installment, check out Yuichi Higashionna’s Fluorescent at Marianne Boesky Gallery.
Posted inOpinion
European Commission Deems Flavin “Lighting Fittings”
If it looks like lighting, smells like lighting and lights things up, it’s probably lighting! At least so says the European Commission in an argument over whether or not the work of Dan Flavin and Bill Viola qualify as art. They don’t think so, and express their criticisms in a series of hilarious quotes.
Posted inOpinion
How the Art World Has Changed Since the 1970s
Artinfo’s Andrew Russeth writes about Jeffrey Deitch’s talk last Thursday at apexart and what the gallery owner had to say about the difference between the art world then and today.
