ArtReview released its annual Power 100 yesterday, a document that makes a spirited attempt at putting the art world into numbers.
The list held a few surprises, but really, what was most un-surprising about the whole affair was how lame and mainstream it was while frontin’ a snarky facade, insider-style. Because really, no one in the art world knew that Gogo had a lot of pull … right?
Here are a few graphs that try to clarify the bullshit and get at what the Power 100 really means.
This chart may be all you need to decide what font, I mean typeface, to use for a current or upcoming project.
Design historian Steven Heller reminded me a few weeks ago that I use the terms font and typeface interchangeably, point taken (even though my mom was a graphic designer and I should know better), but I have to admit to not being so concerned with the usage since I usually get blank stares when I use typeface with non-design people. Did desktop publishing ruin design terminology? Is the term typeface destined to be labeled arcane in the dictionaries of the near future? My guess is yes.
The Museum of Modern Art’s Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture, an ambitious exhibition that (kinda) rethinks the standard narrative of Abstract Expressionism (aka AbEx), has been open since October 3. The show complicates things by reintroducing us to artists not entirely within the AbEx canon, putting old favorites in a new context and shining a spotlight on the people and places of AbEx.
The question is: did MoMA and its curators accomplish their goal? We turn to the internet at large for a look at how people have reacted to the exhibition!
One might be excused for mistaking Fred Tomaselli’s solo show at the Brooklyn Museum for a pharmacy. Upon closer look, the collaged paintings, baroquely-arranged magazine clippings coated in a thick layer of resin, are embedded with pills the way a microchip is implanted under the skin. Sometimes the names are visible, Vicodin, Oxycontin, even a few Viagras. More often than not, though, the pills only become pills upon closer inspection. From afar, they just look like another element of Tomaselli’s works. Drugs are synthesized into the artist’s paintings, and though the psychological shock of recognizing a pill name remains, the chemicals form just another ingredient.
Yeah, there are drugs in the paintings. Most of them are probably illegal in such vast quantities at Tomaselli uses them. But though that’s the form of the work, that’s not the content: in this case, the medium is not the message. Aren’t we all done with the drug hysteria and fetish, now that weed is basically legal in California and the cliches of the painkiller-addicted housewife and the coke-snorting, bowl smoking banker are just that, cliches? So let’s giggle and move on. What’s behind the drugs in Fred Tomaselli?
We have an update on Julie Torres, the watercolor artist who was bizarrely arrested for painting in public. We reported the full story a few weeks ago and L Magazine published her personal story yesterday.
And now an update in L Magazine from the artist after yesterday’s court date … which features a nice surprise …
Between World War I and II, there was a strong gust of classicism that swept through the Western European avant-garde. Artists from across the continent embraced the language of the ancients as a way to reflect their own time and culture. This taste for antique forms can be interpreted in many different ways, including as an attempt to seek order in a tumultuous time, a way to cloak a modern ideology with powerful symbols, or a reaction to the radicalism of the previous decades. Regardless of the root cause or causes, the style that was at once familiar and dignified was a rich source of inspiration for artists, designers, and architects of all types.
This odd chapter in modern art is the subject of the Guggenheim Museum’s current exhibition Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936, which is a very attractive exhibition that gathers together a remarkable array of objects associated with almost every -ism from the era. The power of classicism is partly due to its malleability and how it was able to lend its voice to any and every modern movement that sought refuge in its silhouettes, drapery, linear logic, and airs of history.
OUR FIRST WEDNESDAY BOOK REVIEW!
Reading Lawrence Weschler’s nigh-legendary book on Robert Irwin, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, inspired me to next grab the New Yorker writer’s other artist-focused book, True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations With David Hockney. As entertaining as they are challenging, the two books are hard to categorize as biographies, though they concern individuals and their oeuvres. Weschler’s works are more like conversations: anecdotal histories formed less by research than by hanging out with an artist, watching exhibitions open and major works develop, witnessing a lifelong artistic practice.
A small coconut tree grows in the corner of Nurture Art. Simply titled “Coconut” (2009), and created by artist Gudmundur Thoroddsen, the leaves seem to reach towards the skylight. A certain twist makes it art — a few of the leaves are painted pink. It resembles one of Matisse’s colorful trees come to life. A plain tree might boast a simple elegant beauty, but Thoroddsen’s concoction proves that an injection of pink can be such a guilty visual pleasure.
Like this tree, many works in this show, titled Duck and Decorated Shed, start with a bland surface and cover it with visual pepper. Theresa Himmer’s set of videos from 2009, The Mountain Series, zoom in on these humongous sequins that are adhered to the sides of unremarkable buildings in Reykjavik. They glisten with a strange glow. Himmer also pulls some basic film tricks that involve playing with the speed of the film. The end result is that this footage resembles clay-mation. Once again, nature looks cooler when it’s tweaked.
One of protean German artist Joseph Beuys’ most famous quotes runs, “Everyone is an artist.” Framed within the artist’s idea of “social sculpture,” a conceptual practice in which our lived world forms a gigantic work of art and individuals become artists in its context, the quote makes sense. The wandering artist spent his time creating sculptures out of society, reshaping thought structures through performances, lectures, and physical objects, working with his fellow human-artists to remake our universe moment to moment. In the present day, I’d rephrase Beuys’ maxim: On the internet, we’re all artists.
One particular online video game, called Minecraft, brings to mind for me the essence of being an artist in the world, presenting a chance for everyone to fulfill Beuys’ definition of Social Sculpture. Where does Social Sculpture meet Social Media?
Felice Varini uses nothing but a bit of color, applied to a wall, to shake you from of your routine and, so he hopes, brighten one of memory’s grey spots a little in a moment of world-flattening surreality. In doing so, Varini is not unlike other artists that have sought to place the viewer within the canvas. Like street artist Aakash Nihalani or installation artist Robert Irwinn, Varini is an artist who has moved beyond just using a canvas to orchestrating whole experiences that a viewer can move through.
In a public installation commissioned by New Haven arts nonprofit Site Projects, Varini takes an unremarkable downtown alley in New Haven and stretches an non-intrusive work entitled “Square and Four Circles” (2010) across a few hundred feet of back alley space.
This video from Imaginary Forces is a short film directed by Mark Gardner that interviews various creative types on the idea of a “desk.” Not just the plain old place you throw down your laptop and toil, but the concept of what a desk really is. Is a desk just the place where you work, or can a desk be an entire creative vision, a space in which new ideas are formed and the world changed? Being desk people ourselves, we at Hyperallergic are particularly fascinated by the possibilities of a workspace and what creativity it can foster. The designers, architects and creatives interviewed for the video speak of the physical desk as well as their mental state when working, the separation between a “home desk” and a “work desk.”
The Museum of Modern Art’s sprawling re-envisioning of Abstract Expressionism, “Abstract Expressionist New York,” inspires a lot of looking. The stately museum’s upper floor galleries, previously dedicated to the slow progress of abstraction in modern art, have been shuffled around to get a better view of exactly how the movement we came to call Abstract Expressionism developed.
It was one particular showing that caught my eye and really caused me to stop in my tracks and rethink where I pigeonholed these artists. Standing sentinel on one back wall were two works that cohered together perfectly, paintings whose muted colors became bright and whose architectonic compositions were like an abstract expressionism slowed down and frozen in time. Upon closer approach, I noticed that the pieces were by Robert Motherwell, an artist I was aware of and respected, but didn’t enormously enjoy. Yet something about these two paintings, “Western Air” (1946-47) and “Personage, with Yellow Ochre and White” (1947) made me reconsider.
