Peter Nadin’s “First Mark” opened at Gavin Brown’s enterprise on June 29th, the first time the artist has exhibited his work in this country since 1992. There’s been massive coverage of Nadin’s “comeback,” but is the show grabbing headlines simply because of Nadin’s backstory and the list of boldfaced names he hung out with in the 1970s and 1980s?
Art
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Ghosts Of Glasnost: “Ostalgia” At The New Museum
The specter of communism currently haunts the New Museum in its summer “bloc-buster” exhibition “Ostalgia.” It’s an ambitious project that consumes most of the galleries with a swirling conglomeration of disparate mediums, artists, scales and concepts that reflect the miasmic atmosphere of post-Soviet territories.
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Planking Around The French Quarter
As geopsychically wondrous as New Orleans is, it’s not exactly the most cutting edge of places; in fact, even in these days of instantaneous communication it sometimes takes ideas and trends a little longer to make their way down here than they do elsewhere. But although we might not be au courant, we do do things down here with a certain kind of panache.
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Bronx Calling: The First AIM Biennial
The Bronx Museum’s Artists in the Marketplace (AIM) program has helped emerging artists in the New York area navigate the business side of art since the 1980s. AIM is now celebrating its 30th anniversary with two joint exhibitions at the Bronx Museum and Wave Hill: Bronx Calling: The First AIM Biennial features 72 participants from the 2010-2011 program and the smaller Taking AIM on the program’s history. I recently journeyed up to the Grand Concourse for the Bronx Museum component of the show.
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WTF Art Guide to Asia: Beijing’s 798 Art Zone
I get lots of emails from people these days asking about the Beijing art scene. What’s it like? How does it compare to New York and Los Angeles? In a country of 1 billion people, with a number of different art centers, there’s of course no simple answer. But if America’s art mecca is Chelsea in New York, then China’s is almost certainly 798 Art Zone (798艺术区) in Beijing. And with that comparison comes the inevitable complaints of commercialization and the loss of soul.
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Dispatch From Sheboygan: On Memory
This morning I stood frozen in private terror facing a room full of smiling senior citizens with various stages of memory loss, feeling ill-prepared to ask them to draw someone who they had never actually met. That is the conceit of my memory-based drawing project, here on the sunny shores of Lake Michigan north of Milwaukee: to get as many people as I can to draw a person or character relying only on their memories and imagination.
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A Geopsychic Tour of New Orleans
“These phenomenona, these wonders of New Orleans, are for the most part simply not explainable in terms of history and culture alone. There is obviously another force at work here, another system, a world of secret realities which is continuously and quietly in confrontation with our own.” In other words, folks: we’re not on Bourbon Street any more.
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Reconfiguring The African Mask: From Artifact To Art Form
Whether sequestered behind glass in a museum or sold to tourists along Fifth Avenue, the African mask is an image from the non-Western world that we are all familiar with. Yet walking though the African art galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the other day, I felt somewhat disconnected from the African mask. Severed from its intended use for performance and ceremonies, the mask as it is presented in the museum becomes an ambiguous object. Does the mask still have relevance when removed from its cultural context? Can we appreciate it for just its form? Is it art or artifact?
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Notes Toward A “Just” Image
Noted photography blogger Joerg Colberg has responded to my piece on the work of Shelby Lee Adams. Colberg states that “it would help us a bit to realize that our hand-wringing about these photographs ultimately won’t have any consequences – unless we spring into some sort of actual action.”
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Doing The Doodle Drag
New Jersey’s Doodle Drag is at it again! This Sunday, July 17, the drawing collective will be hosting “Joy Rider,” a drawing party on the subway.
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14 Portraits Of Post-Warhol Fame
Andy Warhol’s death left us wondering how the quintessential Pop artist would have reacted, or shaped, a society that fulfilled his prophesy of universal, albeit short-lived, fame. But aside from wondering what the artist would have thought of Rebecca Black, his passing left a hole in New York City Nightlife. Thomas Kiedrowski’s new book “Andy Warhol’s New York City” and a series of new “screen tests” by Conrad Ventur speak to the nostalgia this generation feels for the days of Superstars and silver clouds.
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From Louisiana With Love: The 2011 Southern Open (Part 2)
As I mentioned in the first part of this article, Amy Mackie—former curatorial associate of the New Museum in New York, now Director of Visual Arts for the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans—selected quite a few New Orleans artists for this year’s installment of the Southern Open at the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette, LA. While she may have stacked the deck, so to speak, she concisely provided audiences with some of the highest caliber art the exhibition has seen to date.
