For her second solo exhibition at Klaus von Nichtssagend, Empty is Run About Freely, Bushwick-based sculptor Joy Curtis has created several large sculptures comprised of casts she made of interior moldings and architectural details of 77 Water Street, an unused downtown Manhattan bank building, which the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council employed as studio space during Curtis’ residency in 2009. She has been working with the material collected during this residency almost exclusively for the past year. Speaking to the work on display, Curtis told me, “[As artists] we mine the world for materials, and then we impose a force on that matter. I am interested in showing the evidence of imposing force on matter, and showing the evidence of the passage of time.”
Posted inArt
A Populist Attack on the Art World Pulls Punches
According to Eric Doeringer, the artist-curator of I Like the Art World and the Art World Likes Me, the exhibition’s title—a nod to Joseph Beuys’s 1974 performance “I Like America and America Likes Me”—is meant to convey the “fraught relationship between emerging artists and the art-world establishment,” one marked by a simultaneous desire to criticize the art world’s excesses and to be recognized by it. Art about the institutions of art, both physical and discursive, is hardly a new phenomenon, but unlike Marcel Broodthaers and Hans Haacke, cited by Doeringer as predecessors for the work included in this exhibition, what emerges most clearly here is not “institutional critique” but a sense of anxiety or anger about the artists’ own marginalization and lack of mainstream success.
Posted inNews
The Banksy Elephant in the Room
Remember one of Banksy’s recent pieces in Southern California titled “This Looks A Bit Like An Elephant,” which was removed and is now for sale. Well, according to Vandalog, Tachowa Covington (aka Rollerball) has lived inside the tank for about seven years. He says that he saw Banksy paint the tank and he is now homeless. [via Vandalog]
Posted inArt
Scott Kiernan’s Faux Nineties Xeroxes
Scott Kiernan’s canvases want to be underestimated. Their initial impression is bland, but the longer one gazes at these pictures, the weirder and more fascinating they become. At his NURTUREart exhibition Once around the block (twice), Kiernan’s art reveals itself more slowly, doesn’t care if you overlook it, and eventually impresses you by contradicting its first impression.
Posted inBooks
Photojournalism Book Lets Iraqis Tell the Story
Dutch photojournalist Geert van Kesteren’s Baghdad Calling is unique in photojournalism first for its innovative use of the book medium, a compendium of newsprint interspersed with smaller, glossy pages with text and photos. But the content of the book is just as surprising as the format it comes in. The dramatic book, outwardly reminiscent of a UN field manual, mingles van Kesteren’s professional shots of Iraqi families and daily life with his subjects’ own photos, snapshots of the country and their surroundings taken on cell phones and digital cameras.
Posted inOpinion
How to Buy an Old Master for $3
Zakka in DUMBO has an assortment of art-related books, materials and other fun things related to J-pop, but I was after the art in the gumball machines at the back of the store. For $3 you get an Old Master … talk about sweet
Posted inArt
Mark Lombardi’s Information Art
A solo exhibition of works by Mark Lombardi at Pierogi gallery in Williamsburg, feels very timely. Maybe I’m into the paranoia-inducing conspiracy charts because New York’s just-ended art fair week, our own glimpse into the vastness of the international art world, reminded me that there are whole webs of infinite complex connections to the worlds and communities we inhabit. Lombardi’s intricate, highly-researched drawings are clear presentations of information that forces us to rethink how we see ourselves in relation to our political atmosphere.
Posted inArt
Support a New York History of Street Art & Graffiti!
There are only four days left to support a very unique street art project that will create a multi-faceted street art exhibition at the former Donnell Library on 53rd Street in midtown Manhattan, which is across the street from MoMA.
In an era where street art and graffiti is becoming increasingly scarce in Manhattan, this project, PANTHEON: A history of art from the streets of New York City, will explore the heritage of street art and graffiti across the street from the high temple of Modern art.
Posted inOpinion
Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico at 92
In honor of International Women’s Day, here’s a video of one of modernism’s most enduring female painters, Georgia O’Keeffe. The artist had visited New Mexico on and off since 1928 but in 1940 she bought a house in Ghost Ranch. This video captures O’Keeffe at age 92, still in New Mexico, and still drawing inspiration from the landscape around her.
Posted inOpinion
Hear Stories From the Rothko Chapel
The Rothko Chapel, a non-denominational devotional space in Houston, Texas, is home to fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko. Visitors come to the chapel for all sorts of reasons, from meditation to art appreciation. Check out this NPR piece for a few of the stories of the Rothko Chapel’s visitors.
Posted inArt
In Defense of Art Fairs
Walking around the two-pier behemoth that is today’s Armory Show, it’s hard to imagine that this was once a scrappy upstart hotel fair. Over the course of the week, I heard various people speak nostalgically about what the Armory had been like in its early years, as if it had been some prelapsarian moment before the art world discovered capitalism. However, in a 1995 Frieze magazine survey, co-founder Pat Hearn stated bluntly that “the art fair is simply an effort to move the product in whatever way possible.”
Posted inArt
WTF is… the Secondary Market?
Throughout the course of NYC’s art fair week, I overheard questions over what art work was being sold, and who it was being sold to. Of course, art fairs exist to sell work, and the work on display is there to be sold. But where do these works come from? This is where the secondary market comes in. Though most galleries simply sell work from the studios of the artists they represent, the secondary market deals in works that have already been sold, at least once. Fairs like the Armory’s Modern section focus heavily on secondary market works, as do auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
