SAN FRANCISCO — I will admit that it had been a long day filled with mundane tasks — conference calls, email catch-up, copyediting — when I wandered into the exhibition Office Space, currently on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Pilvi Takala
Wayfinding through Ruins and Castles in a Governors Island Art Intervention
It’s unlikely you’d notice any of the art in Governors Island’s Visitors without a map, as it’s hiding in an abandoned swimming pool, a nondescript rock in a fortress, and those hulking billboards urban eyes are trained to ignore.
The Ungovernables Flips the Bird
Post-colonial studies, the legacy of 19th and 20th century colonialism and imperialism, a hit on the academic circuit, underlies the raisone d’etre of the New Museum’s Triennale, The Ungovernables, the second Triennial devoted to global contemporary art. Artists are presented as “actors in the world around them rather than commentators,” and portrayed as “negatively ungovernable.” The show’s emphasis on a series of global “urgencies” casts a wide net focusing more on the message than the medium, which is both the show’s strength and its undoing.