MoMA’s recognition of modernism’s multiverse, alongside artist-led drives for greater transparency on the part of museums and their boards, brought a twinge of optimism to the close of the year.
Louise Lawler
Posted inArt
Louise Lawler’s Quiet Melancholy
If Lawler’s works were originally read as art about art, they now feel like art for art’s sake.
Posted inArt
The Art Object as Institutional Critique
The artists in Décor urge viewers to question the creator’s role in the management and presentation of art.
Posted inFilm
Louise Lawler Screens a Movie with No Images
Louise Lawler’s A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture, which recently “screened” at the Museum of Modern Art, a film is played in a cinema with only its soundtrack.
Posted inArt
A Photography Biennial Asks a Perennial Question About the Medium’s Objectivity
This year, FotoFocus pushes beyond the baseline conception of photography as a documentary process — something artists have sought to have done pretty much since the advent of the medium.
Posted inArt
A Celebration of Women Who Made It to the Top of the Art World
LOS ANGELES — The current show at Sprüth Magers gallery, Eau de Cologne, has a title that might seem like a play on words (that’s what I initially thought), but it is actually quite straightforwardly unironic.
Posted inArt
Contemplating Perfection and Imperfection at Dia:Beacon
A visit last weekend to Dia:Beacon, the vast repository of Minimalist art on the east bank of the Hudson River, brought home once more the complexities and contradictions of a movement whose goal was to be as plain as the nose on your face.
Posted inArt
A Show of Over 100 Women Artists Offers Redress but No Resolution
MIAMI — The exhibition of over 100 women artists currently on view at the Rubell Family Collection is difficult to review because the works do not all fit into the space and the decision was made to rotate them over the course of the show.
Posted inArt
The Values of Louise Lawler
At the core of artist Louise Lawler’s work is the question of place, by which I don’t mean simply a notion of geography, but also hierarchies.
Posted inArt
Skewering the Egos of Male Artists at Dia:Beacon
Of the 25 artists whose work is currently on view at Dia:Beacon, four of them are women. (And one of those women is half of a husband-and-wife team.) The open, spacious museum just up the river from New York City is beautiful, staid, and a bit, well, male. Even a fantastic three-room installation of wry Louise Bourgeois sculptures can’t undercut the machismo you get from wandering through a hall full of John Chamberlain pieces (crushed steel), while knowing that under your feet there’s another hall full of Richard Serras (sculpted steel). The male pieces just loom so large — they take up an enormous amount of space, both physically and emotionally.
