At the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ new Wing of the Americas, the story of American art is told over the course of four floors, ranging from colonial and indigenous art through modernism. Stopping before contemporary, the third floor above ground level is the home of American modernism. The opening gallery of the floor tells a story that’s neither comprehensive nor diverse, instead presenting a kind of multifaceted, unfocused face to greet the public. How does this hanging impact the works on view in the gallery, and museum-goers’ experience of the art?
Posted inNews
Chelsea’s Luhring Augustine Buys Bushwick Outpost
BushwickBK’s Stephen Truax, who also contributes to this blogazine, reports on Luhring Augustine’s new Bushwick space:
“The new building is primarily going to be our storage facility, but we hope to have at least a quarter of the space dedicated to exhibitions,” said Barrow. A 2,500-square-foot exhibition space would be a first for Bushwick, though it’s not clear if it will be open to the public or just collectors.
Posted inHyperallergic
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Posted inOpinion
Top Ten Twitter Follows for Chinese Art
As far as the year in social media goes, Twitter is far and away my choice for a handy source of updates, information and air-testing inside the art world or out. Pretty much anything that you want to know about gets broadcast into your Twitter stream with a good enough group of follows. To the end of blowing up your Twitterverse, I wanted to give you my personal recommendations for ten English-language Twitter follows that will help you keep track of the Chinese contemporary art world.
Posted inOpinion
Ian Bogost Casts Video Games as Haiku
Critic, writer and independent game developer Ian Bogost has created a suite of four games entitled “A Slow Year.” Comprised of a set piece about each of the four seasons, Bogost has made video games into meditations, interactive haiku meant to slow down the player instead of them speed up. Kotaku has the details.
Posted inArt
Looking Beyond Pollock’s Drip Paintings
Abstract Expressionist New York shines a bright and bold light on Jackson Pollock. Although the selection on view is obviously not as extensive as MoMA’s major retrospective in 1998-99, the show is still a rare and precious opportunity to see many of Pollock’s paintings under one roof.
His paintings are often crudely divided into two categories. On the hand, there are the mighty drip paintings — where splatters and splotches of paint dance across the picture plane. Then, there is everything else.
Posted inArt
How Do You Show Performance Art? Ana Mendieta vs Marina Abramović
We’re approaching a pivotal point in the progress of performance art in which the once rogue medium is becoming canonized, institutionalized and historicized. If the epic Marina Abramović retrospective at MoMA, The Artist is Present, wasn’t enough to convince you that the early group of performance artists are becoming anointed saints, the recent retrospective at Galerie Lelong of the late Ana Mendieta is another step forward. Yet the two exhibitions present parallel methods of exhibiting historical performance art, the first focused on recreating performances, the second on exhibiting artifacts. I see the latter Mendieta exhibition, Documentation and Artwork, 1972 – 1985, as the far more succesful.
Posted inArt
Hundreds Attend Wojnarowicz Censorship Protest in Manhattan
Today, approximately 400-500 protesters gathered on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum to take part in a rally demanding that the Smithsonian return the censored video by artist David Wojnarowicz, “A Fire In My Belly,” to the National Portrait Gallery’s Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.
Organized by Art+, a New York-based group organizing direct action against the censorship of Wojnarowicz’s video, the march began in the middle of Museum Mile and marched uptown along Fifth Avenue until the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, which is a Manhattan-based Smithsonian institution.
Posted inArt
Thinking About the Origins of Street Art, Part 2
If the first traces of public visual expressions in the modern period didn’t have much of an artistic will, they definitively helped develop what urban art is today. They used a visual language that other artists picked up on as effective and unorthodox ways of communicating their message to society, without the need of established art circles or more formalized practices. But now I wanted to point out some early artists who feel more closer to our notion of what a street artist is. Individuals who were or still are consciously creating art work for the street.
Posted inOpinion
Allora & Calzadilla’s Hole-y Piano
This video was produced for MoMA’s ninth installment of the Performance Exhibition Series, which features Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, more commonly referred to as Allora & Calzadilla, and the staging of their haunting performance “Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano” (2008). The duo will be representing the United States during the next Venice Biennale in 2011.
Posted inNews
AA Bronson Negotiates, Offers Space for Wojnarowicz
In an email posted on Newsgrist, artist AA Bronson, who asked that his portrait of Felix Partz be removed from the Smithsonian’s Hide/Seek exhibition following the censorship, suggests to director Martin Sullivan that his piece be removed to make room for the Wojnarowicz video.
