When I was little I went to the Whitney Museum over and over to see “Cirque Calder,” Alexander Calder’s three-dimensional cartoon of performers preening, frozen in mise-en-scène. Walking into Calder Shadows, on view at Venus Over Manhattan, I felt the same childish camaraderie with the artist, only this time it held fear of the bogeyman.
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Duke Riley’s Pigeon Army of Cuban Cigar Smugglers
The United States spends billions of dollars on a balloon surveillance system on the Florida Straits waters as part of its Trading with the Enemy Act against Cuba, the only country currently under the restriction. Yet as Brooklyn-based artist Duke Riley states in his video for a recent project: “As it turns out, homing pigeons cannot be identified by surveillance balloons nor can they be prosecuted for smuggling cigars.”
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Photographer as Advocate: Lewis Hine’s America
Odds are that when you close your eyes and imagine the huddled masses at Ellis Island, or brawny men at derricks hoisting iron bars to the top of the Empire State Building, you are seeing images that Lewis Hine introduced into the popular imagination.
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Blowing Smoke: Robert Wilson Agog Over Gaga in Louvre Show
PARIS — I was lucky enough, and I am old enough, to have been in the audience of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach in 1976 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and then again at The Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1984.
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Channeling Ryan Trecartin in Brooklyn
Ryan Trecartin is the voice of a generation … of monkeys who WhaTevEr. His films make me want to kill myself, like in a good way, because she is just.so.current.
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A Performance Artist’s Tribute to Nelson Mandela
On December 11, performance artist and sculptor Angela Freiberger offered a succinct and touching “Homage to Mandela” at the Tambaran Gallery.
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The Utopian Vision of Jean Paul Gaultier
Sailor stripes, corsets, and men’s skirts are not just the cheeky trademarks of a brilliant designer, but tools for a deeper excavation of culture.
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Some Where’s Rainbow: Pink Floyd and Dorothy Land in Bushwick
Last week Brooklyn’s Where Gallery celebrated the close of its inaugural show with Dark Side of the Rainbow, the live over-dubbed experience of Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) as synchronized with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973).
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Single Point Perspective: Paweł Althamer’s Grass-Fed Surrealism
Inside the second floor galleries housing the contemporary collection of the Museum of Modern Art, a sculpture called “Bruno” (1998–2012) stands in quiet command of the room. Made primarily of grass and cow intestines, its materials transform the human body into a mediation on mortality via the digestive tract.
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Painting, Perception, and the Emphatically Handmade
The recent resurgence of interest in contemporary painting has posited the unique object — especially the handcrafted, the slapped-together, and the aggressively tactile — as yin to neo-conceptualism’s yang, a raggedy-edged refutation of the factory-finished, the reproducible, and the overly cerebral.
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Barbara Stanwyck, Proto-Feminist Hollywood Star
It’s a sure sight for sore eyes to see the name “Stanwyck” emblazoned on a cinematheque marquee. Then again, not everyone today may be familiar with this name — but the uninitiated have every reason to stop in for one of the afternoon or evening double bills playing all through December at Film Forum.
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Breeding the Perfect Chair
Good or bad, every experiment starts with a hypothesis. For Dutch-born designer Jan Habraken with New York-based design studio FormNation, it was the question: “What if we apply the science of genetic engineering to an inanimate object?”
