LOS ANGELES — Everyone’s done it at some point — crank up the water on the hose on a sunny day just to see that wonderful prism of light. Now, Mexican-born artist Gabriel Dawe does us one better by bringing rainbows to life, one thread at a time.
Art
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Occupying Minds, Not Streets
Mounting an exhibition anywhere in the neighborhood of occupation aesthetics can be precarious nowadays, for people are increasingly fed up with the same reiterations of ideological conceptualism and the ultra–politically correct, derivative works that skim the surface of real world problems precipitated by global capitalism, government incompetence, dictatorship and injustice. But Beijing-based artist Chen Shaoxiong had a rather pragmatic impetus for reconsidering — through art — global phenomena from the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street to democratic elections that have sprung up in remote Chinese villages.
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How To Talk About Art: Jeff Koons Edition
With plans in the offing for Jeff Koons’s astounding “Train” to dangle preposterously over the heedless noggins of visitors to the High Line, it might just be a good time to polish up your talking points regarding the greatest of all kitsch artists.
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An Arts Festival on the Prairie
A few weekends ago, I drove to Urbana, Illinois, to take in the Boneyard Arts Festival, a four-day program of open studios, readings, concerts and performances.
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Screens, Networks and Our Imagination
When I visited JODI’s current exhibition, Street Digital, at the Museum of the Moving Image, I wondered how the notorious duo would take their earlier net art practices into the “street” (or gallery). Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans of JODI became well-known in the 1990s for upending traditional internet experiences with their online artworks. From wwwwwwwww.jodi.org to http://404.jodi.org/, they presented abstract code and programming glitches as art, bringing the background source of digital works into the foreground. Their work looked more like a crash of your web-browsing program rather than a coherent, readable text.
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Can We Still Learn To Speak Martian?
Let us start with two addresses just a few blocks from each other in San Francisco, and what was happening there in the early and mid-1950s. On Halloween, 1954, the Six Gallery opened at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco. The six founders were Wally Hedrick, Deborah Remington, Hayward King, David Simpson, John Ryan and Jack Spicer. Their shared interest was to have a place to exhibit art and host literary events, to put art and poetry on the walls, side by side. At the debut exhibition, Spicer’s poems were in fact on the wall, just like the paintings and drawings of the other co-founders.
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When Things Go Wrong: Serban Ionescu’s “Secret History”
Serban Ionescu was born in Communist Romania and did not speak until he was six. That’s what it says in Dede Young’s essay for Secret History, his solo show at Bridge Gallery on the Lower East Side.
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What Happens When You Are Not a Track Star for Mineola Prep
Artist Gary Stephan, whose new drawings will be exhibited this fall at Devening Projects + Editions in Chicago, is doing the best work of his life.
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Pie in the Sky When You Die: Art, Money and Myth
Once it seemed to matter — the high end, I mean. Art and money, when you put the two words together, would invariably lead to HirstMurakamiKoons unless they were referencing KoonsMurakamiHirst. And the crazy gushes of cash that went their way, and the way they flaunted it, became prime rib for glossy magazines and academic panels alike. But that was so 2007.
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Kinetic Mexico City
MEXICO CITY —Despite its relaxed façade, Mexico City is encircled with a buzz of dynamic activity added to by the bustle of its formidable traffic jams.
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Lights Out? Detroit’s Quick Fix
DETROIT — The clichés of 1960s drug culture are now on full display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit during Joshua White & Gary Panter’s Light Show.
