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First Sotheby’s, and now the Whitney. While the Teamsters of Local 814 have been fighting with Sotheby’s since August for a better contract, a new labor dispute has cropped up for the art handlers of Local 966 that work at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In the 1960s, Paco Rabanne subverted traditional dressmaking techniques in his fashions, eschewing the needle and thread for pliers and wire and replacing fabric with metallic discs and panels. The so-called “space age” dresses constructed solely of inflexible paillettes revolutionized how women could adorn their bodies. Now, Etsy-extraordinaire Hally McGehean continues the trajectory of this alternative dress style in her work, with some über-conceptual 21st Century touches.
Museums are turning more, and with more creativity, to their own permanent collections. Is necessity the mother of invention once again, or is there a real interest among museums to breathe new life into their own holdings? (Or both?) Either way, the public is reaping the benefits. Today viewers have more opportunities to see important works recontextualized by enterprising curators who are themselves reexamining the ways we construct and perceive our art histories.
Remember Oakley M-Frame sunglasses? They’re supposed to look like the future, with gradient lenses in a variety of neon colors and knotted frames that bear a resemblance to tensed muscle and ligaments. What they actually look like is a future imagined from the 1980s, in which some mixture of cyberpunk fashion, steroidal athlete aesthetic and Gatorade-style visual punch is totally au courant. New media prankster Cory Arcangel has turned these glasses into monuments, casting them in bronze and immortalizing them in a series of readymades called “Sports Products” (2011). Are you ready for 80s nostalgia? You better be, because it’s ready for you.
Tomorrow marks the opening of Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools, a full floor of new and recent work by the artist at the Whitney Museum. Lucky you, you get to see it a day early! I previewed the exhibition and came back with a photo essay featuring bowling video games, photoshop gradients, bad golfers and epic sunglasses.
This week has been pretty huge for New York City’s museum community. Newly announced shake-ups mean that the Metropolitan Museum will be taking over the Whitney’s uptown Breuer building as the younger institution heads downtown to a new Renzo Piano-designed space. The Museum of Modern Art is buying the embattled American Folk Art Museum’s 10 year-old building down the block, a sale that has become necessary with the Folk Art Museum’s low admission sales and mounting debt, caused in part by the construction of the building. With all this property-buying and hotel museum-building, New York City has become a giant Monopoly board for art institutions. The question remains — who gets the railroads?
It is perhaps telling that the first piece in the exhibition Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work to date, is not one of the text-based paintings for which he is best known, but “Hands” (1996), a massive canvas tacked to the wall of the exhibition’s entrance with pushpins, bearing the image of outstretched palms against a black background. Drawn from a mass-media photograph of Benjamin Chavis and Louis Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Man March, enlarged to the point of degradation and then screenprinted, what appears here is a copy of a copy of a copy, an image that can no longer articulate what it once represented.
Unlike MoMA’s Marina Abramovic check-in badge, the Whitney’s new Foursquare collaboration is no joke. After using your smart phone to check in to the museum twice, plus once at a site pulled from the Whitney museum’s history, users will receive the “Whitneyphile” badge, which also grants holders a $5 ticket to the museum.
This weekend’s Required Reading brings us up to speed on the situation of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, plus catches up on some of the things we missed while breaking the news, from movies demystifying the myth of the artist to video games histories and questions of morality and happiness.
In Charles LeDray’s workworkworkworkwork (that’s five in total) exhibition at the Whitney, the artist has created “MENS SUITS” (2006-2009), a replica of the shop floor of a thrift store in miniature. But this is no mini train set; the shop is actually somewhere between life size and tiny. Check out this video with Whitney curator Carter Foster for a peek into LeDray’s strangely scaled world.
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