For meditations on time, there are few places more frenetic with marking the seconds than Grand Central Terminal. The hundreds of thousands of people that pass through the station each day create a constant motion around the gold clock that sits calmly ticking away the moments in the center of the Grand Concourse. It’s around this idea that On Time / Grand Central at 100 was organized by MTA Arts for Transit and Urban Design.
Art
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A View from the Easel
CHICAGO — Artists from Denmark, Arkansas, Idaho, New York, and Pennsylvania take part in our continuing series on artist studios.
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The Master of Coney Island: The Art of Larry Millard
When Larry Millard showed up in Coney Island in 1957, he was looking for work as a sign painter. His work was so impressive he was hired to do murals across the amusement area, particularly in the recently demolished Playland Arcade. Yet just as suddenly as he appeared, he vanished in 1960 and was never heard from again.
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Jean Cocteau: The Man in the Mirror
HONG KONG — I fell in love with Jean Cocteau when I was 19. I spent nights taking photographs of his epic 1930 film The Blood of a Poet frame by frame. The infatuation was similar to one I had with Picasso, whose paintings I copied obsessively, determined to learn the language of the man who made “Guernica.” In both cases, my heart was eventually broken. First, I learned Picasso used women like he used his paintbrushes. Then it transpired that Cocteau was a Nazi sympathizer. It was hard to know where I stood with both artists afterwards.
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Klaus Biesenbach #ArtTalk Recap
On Monday, a sold-out crowd turned out for our inaugural ArtTalk with Klaus Biesenbach. The event could not have been a more auspicious launch for the #ArtTalk series, with which we hope to host edifying speakers engaged with the world of visual culture in unique and provocative ways.
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The Artists Who Gave Domestic Workers Toy Grenades
HONG KONG — “I wanted to enter Hong Kong homes forcefully, allowing these mechanisms of art to become a platform of conspiracy for the Filipino domestic workers.” Sun Yuan and Peng Yu discuss their photographic series on view at Art Basel Hong Kong.
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The Kaleidoscopic Visions of Leslie Thornton
Most of us are somewhat conscious of the way in which the technological tools both create and limit what is possible visually, and how that evolves over time. Leslie Thornton’s new video work, “Luna,” is a tour de force exploration of these possibilities.
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Early Prints by Mary Cassatt Offer a Glimpse into One of NYC’s Overlooked Art Collections
Up in a hallway off the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library is a small exhibition of prints from one of Impressionism’s iconic artists. Created between 1878 and 1898 by Mary Cassatt, the quiet depictions of women in repose with family pets or viewing the opera might not immediately catch the eye of those who happen to pass by, but they represent not just the early experimentations of Cassatt, but one of New York’s greatest overlooked art collections.
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Intertextual Healing: Lygia Pape’s “Divisor” Restaged for the First Time in Asia
HONG KONG — The staging of Lygia Pape’s 1968 performance “Divisor” on the streets of Hong Kong was a fantasy I never knew I had, but witnessing it was a dream nonetheless. Presented as part of the current exhibition A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, Ghosts, Rebels. Sars, Leslie and the Hong Kong Story (May 17–July 20 2013) at the nonprofit space Para Site, this current staging of “Divisor” channels the potency of the seminal work into another context, one defined by the effects of colonialism, plagues, politics, contagion, sterilization, and segregation.
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The Bermuda Triangle of Art
This may sound like the world’s most overwrought art gag. And, certainly, there is no small irony in critiquing the creative numbness of the art market with pieces that will be sold on that very same market. But William Powhida’s artistic spoofs are so spot on, and his critiques so incisive, it’s hard not to get sucked in by the whole exercise.
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Skewering the Egos of Male Artists at Dia:Beacon
Of the 25 artists whose work is currently on view at Dia:Beacon, four of them are women. (And one of those women is half of a husband-and-wife team.) The open, spacious museum just up the river from New York City is beautiful, staid, and a bit, well, male. Even a fantastic three-room installation of wry Louise Bourgeois sculptures can’t undercut the machismo you get from wandering through a hall full of John Chamberlain pieces (crushed steel), while knowing that under your feet there’s another hall full of Richard Serras (sculpted steel). The male pieces just loom so large — they take up an enormous amount of space, both physically and emotionally.
