Newark is getting ready to blow up this week. The city’s Open Doors Studio Tour, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary, kicks off Thursday night with a sneak preview of the exhibition Call & Response at 570 Broad Street. The four-day festival features more than 300 artists. Events include group exhibitions, site-specific installations, open studios, poetry readings, dance performances, and music.
Art
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Modeling the Post-Gender Body
Yesterday, top model Andrej Pejic met the Queen of England wearing a pencil skirt. Why is that a statement worthy of reporting, you ask? Because hiding underneath that pencil skirt was a piece of male anatomy.
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Anthony Goicolea’s Slowly Approaching Apocalypse
The vibe of Anthony Goicolea’s first traveling museum solo show is a slow melancholy. Looking at the photos, videos, paintings and installation in Alter-Ego: A Decade of Work by Anthony Goicolea at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia made me sink slowly into thoughts of living with apocalypse. Goicolea’s work envisions apocalypse not as an abrupt event followed by an aftermath, but as a slow and definitive ruin that continues throughout life.
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Messing With Your Senses With “Phenomenal” Light in California
SAN DIEGO — One of the most anticipated shows of Pacific Standard Time — the Getty’s epic initiative to “celebrate the birth of the LA art scene” and demonstrate that art history has also been made outside of New York — is the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface. Spanning both the La Jolla and Downtown locations, Phenomenal seeks to investigate the artists working in the 1960s and 1970s who turned to light instead of form and addressed notions of perception. For artists playing with natural light, Southern California was the perfect place to work.
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A Zine Archive 30 Years Later Is Still Punk As Fuck
To my pleasant surprise this weekend, while going about my business I was stopped by several New Yorkers, from various walks of life, all advertising information about the Occupy Wall Street protests. Occupy Wall Street seem to be on the top of everyone’s mind these days or at least the tips of their tongues. Indeed, the spreading protests all over the country seem to harness a certain discontent present but aimless in the public unconsciousness. Love them or hate them, there is definitely a public zeitgeist surrounding the whole thing. Visiting the goings on downtown I was reminded of the power and necessity of cheaply produced posters, pamphlets and broadsides and their relationship to organized resistance. With thoughts of protest and grass roots organization I happened onto the newest show at Boo Hooray Gallery on Canal Street in Chinatown.
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More Art in Odd Places
My weekday exploration of Art in Odd Places had required a careful eye for small acts of ritual, the theme of the 2011 edition of the annual art event that takes place along 14th Street and in Union Square. Two Saturdays ago the art was impossible to miss, even if it was still in unexpected places.
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Could Activism Be Art?
What is the connection between art and social change? I’ve pondered this question for many years. Art is a deed staged not to accomplish a social or political goal but as an end in itself. Yes, an act could be art, but what about activism?
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Tackling the Biggest Taboo in Art: $
Artist Man Bartlett is probing one of the biggest taboos in the art world, money, in his current Google Doc “performance” titled “$.” I spoke to him about his ideas in the most recent installment of Hyperallergic TV.
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15 New York Art World-ers on Art Controversies Today
With “sensitive to art and its discontents” written into the blogazine’s sub-header, Hyperallergic is no strange to contemporary art controversy, but we decided to ask 11 New York-based artists, critics and curators what they considers the most important and urgent controversy in visual art at the moment.
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Making Sense of Trauma Through Art
To commemorate the 10th anniversary, MoMA PS1 organized a group exhibition, titled September 11, now on view to January 9, 2012. Curator Peter Eleey has brought together more than 70 works by 41 artists — many made prior to 9/11 — to investigate the attacks’ enduring resonance.
Avoiding sensational images of the attack, as well as art made directly in response, the exhibition offers an entry point by which to contemplate the tragic event and its after effects and to look at the ways it has changed how we see and experience the world in its wake.
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Some Signs from Day 11 of #OccupyLA
LOS ANGELES — It’s Tuesday, Day 11, and the honeymoon period for Occupy LA seems to have ended. There is much spirited debate about what actions to take and disagreements over how the General Assembly should facilitate discussions. Occupiers who have been around since the beginning are restless from the movement’s week-long dithering while news of conflicts with police in Boston, Seattle and elsewhere have made emotions run high among protesters. Still, the occupation is now 269 tents strong and the amount of creative dissent increases everyday.
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The INTERNETworked Bridge: Connected But Unequal
BEIJING — I moved to China almost a year ago now, into a country where I knew no one and where even the internet was foreign. I pulled away from my main social circle geographically, but did what I could do stay connected via the internet and phone.
And yet, just as I turned to the internet for social connection, I also realized it was increasingly difficult to rely on my usual circles. Timezones, the Great Firewall and the weak internet connection in my neighborhood all made me realize that the utopian ideal of global connection was far from being achieved.
