So-called revisionist art history has made room for numerous, formerly overlooked or ignored artists in Western Civ’s recognized canon, but what is that establishment narrative to make of a big-boned Southern gal who played avant-garde cello in the nude while submerged in a Plexiglas tank filled with river water?
Fluxus
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“George,” the Maciunas Film: An Emerging Portrait of an Influential Enigma
The Lithuanian-born, New York-based American artist, graphic designer, architect, urban-housing activist, and art-culture-and-society visionary George Maciunas (1931–1978) is best remembered as the conceiver and self-appointed leader of Fluxus.
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How a Fluxus Pioneer Tuned Televisions to a World of Noise
PARIS — Following on the heels of the Jean Dupuy and Robert Filliou gallery exhibitions, a third radical Fluxus-related artist is receiving a museum-quality gallery show in Paris: Wolf Vostell.
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An Exhibition to Put on (and Inside) Your Head
PARIS — Located in La Chaux-de-Fonds near Neuchâtel in the Swiss Jura Mountains, watchmakers Greubel Forsey are celebrating their tenth anniversary by honoring the gadfly artist Robert Filliou (1926–1987) in Paris with a rather curious show called Chapeaux! Hommage à Robert Filliou — and with a nonfunctioning watch in his name.
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Divisions of Labor: ‘Capitalist Realism’ at Artists Space
From Baudelaire’s 1859 dismissal of photography on down, the image-culture of the petit bourgeois “mob” has long served as a provocation to artistic thought, a relationship that reached its most literal apogee in the West with the Pop Art of the 20th century.
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‘Joseph Beuys: Process 1971–1985’ at Rooster Gallery
“Socio-economic illumination, enabled by the evolutionary process of thought, was Beuys’ end-goal,” writes Kara L. Rooney in her substantial catalogue essay for Joseph Beuys: Process 1971–1985, the small but ambitious show she’s curated at the similarly disposed Rooster Gallery on Orchard Street.
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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.
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Performance Art Through the Lens
MoMA photography curator Roxana Marcoci knows that we are experiencing a “renaissance of performance”. The show she has curated in collaboration with Eva Respini, Staging Action: Performance in Photography since 1960, will explore the role of the photographic image in this surge of performative work, both as a document of the performance and as art work on its own. The MoMA exhibition, which opens this Friday January 28, begins in the 1960s at a time when performance began to emerge as a singular field of art based on the carrying out of specific art actions.
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Short Films by Jonas Mekas Surface Online [UPDATED]
In light of yesterday’s shocking news that avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas is suing art dealer Harry Stendhal for a supposed swindle, I wanted to share one positive highlight of the business relationship between Stendhal and Mekas that just surfaced online … 14 short films, which include three episodes of his 365 web project from 2007 and 11 from the 40 Short Films release in 2006. UPDATE: Thanks to an anonymous commenter, I learned that ALL the 365 web videos are on an newer Jonas Mekas site that doesn’t seem to show up on individual video searches. ENJOY ALL 40 SHORT FILMS AND ALL 365 VIDEOS AT jonasmekasfilms.com. THANK YOU, ANONYMOUS COMMENTER!
