PARIS — In 1947, at the urging of Paris gallery owner Pierre Loeb, anguished French poet, actor, philosopher, madman, genius, playwright, and director Antonin Artaud fêted Vincent Van Gogh in a bizarre but exquisite text that rails against universal imbecility.
Joseph Nechvatal
Joseph Nechvatal is an artist whose computer-robotic assisted paintings and computer software animations are shown regularly in galleries and museums throughout the world. In 2011 his book Immersion Into Noise was published by the University of Michigan Library's Scholarly Publishing Office in conjunction with the Open Humanities Press. He exhibited in Noise, a show based on his book, as part of the Venice Biennale 55, and is artistic director of the Minóy Punctum Book/CD.
Posted inArt
Bill Viola’s Moving Void
PARIS — Free-floating habits are often hard to abandon. The term “video” as a definable medium — and thus “video art” — is now essentially archaic, due to the convergence of all capture technologies into post-media computer manipulated moving image/sound files.
Posted inBooks
Art’s Post-Media Malaise
PARIS — The post-media suggestion itself has been the subject of deliberation for around two decades now. This audacious anthology cleverly brings some of these historical texts together, along with newly commissioned ones, to explore the shifting ideas and speculative practices associated with the idea of post-media.
Posted inArt
In Paris, Punk’s Curatorial Redemption
PARIS — Unlike the widely ridiculed Costume Institute show PUNK: Chaos to Couture, a show that examined punk’s impact on high fashion from the movement’s birth in the 1970s through its enduring influence today, Europunk: An artistic revolution, recently closed at Cité de la Musique, was rigorously periodic (ending in 1980) and broader in range.
Posted inArt
Wonder World, or Against the New Universal Exhibition
PARIS — Theatre of the World, currently on view at La Maison Rouge, raises the thorny issue of the individual and particular against the homogeneous collective.
Posted inArt
Philippe Parreno, Relational Puppetmaster
PARIS — My long encounter with Philippe Parreno’s vast but fey exposition Anywhere, Anywhere, Out Of The World was anything but otherworldly.
Posted inArt
Blowing Smoke: Robert Wilson Agog Over Gaga in Louvre Show
PARIS — I was lucky enough, and I am old enough, to have been in the audience of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach in 1976 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and then again at The Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1984.
Posted inArt
Painting and Philosophy: An Assessment
SAINT-PAUL DE VENCE, France — The very idea of philosopher as art curator deeply interests me. One swiftly dreams of what Gilles Deleuze might have done with the opportunity to curate an art exhibition at MoMA: Art and Alloverness perhaps? Or Michel Foucault: the New Panopticons at the Centre Georges Pompidou?
Posted inBooks
Whither Art? David Joselit’s Digital Art Problem
Is it still possible to imagine a book purporting to be about the circulation of images and art within the saturated global network that never mentions the existence of net art and digital art?
Posted inArt
Why Don’t People Get the New Stedelijk?
Dissing the Stedelijk Museum’s new Mels Crouwel–designed wing, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman off-handedly compared the building to a “ridiculous” bathroom tub that suggested to him the sensation of “hearing Bach played by a man wearing a clown suit.” On the speed-rail ride back to Paris from a visit to the Amsterdam institution, it occurred to me that he completely got it wrong. Mels Crouwel did not give the museum a tub; he gave it a captivating sarcophagus, an often tub-shaped funeral receptacle designed to hold a corpse. And that is as it should be. After all, modernism is long dead.