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?
Art
Posted inArt
A Bag Lady by Any Other Name
There are many dystopian futures out there. Mary Mattingly’s, recently on view at Robert Mann Gallery, is oddly disjunctive, containing the requisite pessimism imbued with occasional broad strokes of optimism.
Posted inArt
A Skate Park as Neighborhood Stabilization in Detroit
CHICAGO — An artist-run non-profit organization, Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope’s Power House Productions works to develop and implement neighborhood stabilization strategies in Detroit, a city where property is cheap and the stakes are high.
Posted inArt
Radically Rethinking the Architecture of Death
What happens when you die? Well, in a literal way, what happens to everyone else. You’re likely to have a traditional, costly, funeral, and then a small slot of land in a quiet sprawl of cemetery will be yours.
Posted inArt
An American in Paris: Shirley Jaffe’s Paintings from the 1970s
About her work, Shirley Jaffe has stated: “I want a certain tenseness, a congestion or a combination of forms in which none is stronger than any other. I’m interested in the idea of coexistence.” In her current exhibition, Shirley Jaffe: Paintings from the 1970s at Tibor de Nagy (October 17–November 23, 2013), there are six paintings, most of which were done around the middle of the decade. They remain fresh.
Posted inArt
How to Kiss the Sky: Kyle Staver’s Recent Paintings
You don’t see Kyle Staver’s dark, moonlit domains so much as become their invisible and unacknowledged witness and ally. In an age riddled with cynicism and laced with irony, she envisions a shameless alternative in which mythological figures, such as Daphne, Andromeda, Syrinx, Perseus, and a satyr, are at home.
Posted inArt
The Cultured and the Creepy: Balthus’s Parting Shots
Balthus: The Last Studies at Gagosian Gallery offers a kind of endnote to Balthus: Cats and Girls — Paintings and Provocations, the exhibition a couple of blocks away at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s a denouement that disentwines the cultured from the creepiness in Balthus’ work, leaving only the latter intact.
Posted inArt
Visions of the World in Pieces
Rarely have I spent so much time looking in amazement at the skill of an artist to transform paper as I did with Brian Adam Douglas’s excellent How to Disappear Completely at the Andrew Edlin Gallery.
Posted inArt
When Art Spaces Go Extinct
The Chicago-based project Extinct Entities engages with art spaces and collectives that no longer exist. Collaboratively run by Anthony Stepter, Erin Nixon, and Anthony Romero, this project brings together artists and individuals who were once very invested in now-extinct Chicago-based spaces, and artists and cultural workers who spend their waking hours making sure spaces are alive and thrive.
Posted inArt
Biennial Fail: Making It Make Sense
MINNEAPOLIS — Unlike similarly named convocations in Venice or New York or Sao Paulo, Minnesota’s biennial art exhibitions have little to do with market vogue or value. These shows take stock of trends, maybe, but amount to little more than a (usually) thoughtful regional survey — an occasion for self-congratulation and a bit of harmless curatorial grandstanding.
Posted inArt
For One Night, a City Lights Up with Art
DALLAS — Aurora illuminated the Dallas Arts District last Friday, featuring 90 site-specific light and sound installations covering 19 blocks of downtown from 7 pm until midnight. An estimated 30,000 people gathered and wandered through the city, taking in the transformation that molded buildings, illuminated cathedrals, lit hidden spaces, and made concrete, glass, and steel pulse.
Posted inArt
Iraqi Exile and Lament Through a New Lens
DENVER — Flown in from Dubai, an enormous collodion camera dominates a corner of Denver’s Robischon Gallery. The apparatus belongs to artist Halim Al Karim, whose show of ghostly portrait photographs is an unlikely meeting of 19th-century photo processing techniques and a personal reflection on his artistic exile from Iraq.
