Where political repression is not at issue, is it beside the point to talk about artistic freedom?
Thomas Micchelli
Thomas Micchelli is an artist, writer, and co-editor of Hyperallergic Weekend.
Posted inArt
Indigestible Portions: Peter Saul at Mary Boone
What degree of willful perversity is required to think of Peter Saul as heir to Velázquez? Perhaps as much as it takes to plunk a Peter Saul show inside the ultra-blue-chip Mary Boone Gallery, but that’s where we find ourselves on the eve of All Fool’s Day, 2012.
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The Uses of Dismemberment: MoMA’s Exquisite Corpses
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.”
Posted inArt
The Hand in the Garden, the Head in the Attic (The Golem Next Door, Part 2)
Unhampered by false modesty, the timeline for Matt Freedman’s installation, The Golem of Ridgewood reaches all the way back to “Eden—6000 BCE,” where “G-d fashions Adam from the dust of the ground, and animates him.” That’s certainly one way to begin at the beginning, as the King of Hearts gravely advised Alice.
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Mud, Blood and Lightning Bolts (The Golem Next Door, Part 1)
In The Golem: How He Came Into the World (Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam), a German silent film from 1920, a rabbi molds the eponymous humanoid out of clay and animates it through an amulet containing a scrap of parchment written with a magic word.
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Poor Forrest, Dead and Gone
To walk into the artist Robert Gober’s installation of paintings, photographs and writings by Forrest Bess — a visionary painter and self-described, self-surgically-altered “pseudo-hermaphrodite” — was to encounter art frontloaded with (as the reader put it) “cultural significance while also being visually intoxicating, or mesmerizing, you can choose a description.”
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Down and Out at 75th and Madison
I left the 2012 Whitney Biennial with a feeling of leadenness that no amount of free coffee (available at Monday’s press preview, and many thanks for that) or Werner Herzog’s video ode to beauty (“Hearsay of the Soul,” 2012) could alleviate.
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On the Necessity of Thinking Big: A Talk with Jason Andrew
A week ago, on the night of Friday, February 17th, two incongruently mirrored exhibitions opened on either side of the East River: Charles Atlas’ The Illusion of Democracy at Luhring Augustine’s new Bushwick outpost; and What I Know, a large group show of Bushwick artists, curated by Jason Andrew, at the New York Center for Art & Media Studies (NYCAMS) in Chelsea.
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Stealing the Triennial and Other Neat Tricks
As good as the last Triennial was — and, all qualms, quibbles and philosophical differences aside, it was a pretty good survey of emergent art — what it didn’t have was a monster.
Adrián Villar Rojas’ “A person loved me” (2012) has already achieved show-stealer status at The Ungovernables, the second installment of the New Museum’s Triennial, snagging a feature by Randy Kennedy in The New York Times with the sweeping headline, “A Colossus in Clay Speaks a Generation’s Message.”
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Paper People and Rude Shocks
Some shows are designed to shock, and you’d expect that one sporting the title Extra Fucking Ordinary would be among them. And you’d be right.
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Toppled
I can’t say I wasn’t charmed by Marble Sculpture from 350 B.C. to Last Week’s title, though it’s a tad overblown. And I was pleasantly surprised by the almost gauche clutter I encountered on the gallery’s routinely Spartan first floor, with thirty-one midsize-to-extra-large artworks from wildly different historical periods crowded together like refugees from an intergalactic conflict.
Posted inArt
God’s Eye View
Somehow I missed the 16,400 internet posts reporting that the ill-fated luxury liner, Costa Concordia — presumably still on its side in the waters off Tuscany’s Isola del Giglio — was the setting for the first act of Jean-Luc Godard’s latest feature, Film Socialisme (2010).