The Affordable Art Fair’s press preview and opening party on Wednesday was a clusterfuck par none. You’d think there were hundreds of eager collectors chomping at the bit to enter a race to obtain star works early, before the riffraff arrived to pick through the rejections. But this is not Art Basel. The Affordable Art Fair is always a mix of the good, the bad, and the lovely, but competitive shopping it is not.
Reviews
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The End of the World as We Know It
Radiator Arts continues to energize the Long Island City art community. Its mission of showcasing new and emerging artists and curators makes for a remarkably varied program from show to show, but the installations are always topical to a particular theme. Their new exhibit, curated by painter and writer Alan Lupiani, is a heady mix that will leave you ruminating about the state of the U.S. and the world at large. Titled So Real, a contraction of both social realism and Socialist Realism, the exhibit ponders the inherent paradoxes and unlikely commonalities of these two artistic realms.
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In the Digital Era, Old Media Still Packs a Knockout Punch
I want to preface my review of Radiator Arts’s current show So Real with a brief shout-out to Bernard Hopkins. On Saturday, March 9, 2013, Bernard Hopkins defeated Tavoris Cloud to win the Light Heavyweight World Championship at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, NY. At 48, Hopkins became the oldest fighter in history to win a major belt.
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Photographs Turn New York City into a Stage for Humanity
Like so many people who come to New York, part of what attracted me was the spectacle of the city itself. I wanted to wander streets thick with history and creative currents, to watch and become part of the human drama just outside my door. That also describes my experience of Susan Wides’s stunning new project All the Worlds, a series of nine sensuous, panoramic photographs that capture the fluid beauty of New York City’s theatrum mundi. It is on these stages that Wides sees our very human need to align with the poetry of our collective spirits and to reclaim our humanity in the face of co-opting consumerist and political forces.
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The Monumental and Malleable Worlds of El Anatsui
It hangs in the air like paper, like drapery, like a metal curtain, transparent yet solid, monumental and unreal. The space around it, the gallery walls, and you yourself become secondary to this vast and majestic thing. It is red and gold and black and shines as the light ripples across its surface. Woven like a tapestry and tiled like a mosaic, it appears almost medieval, but you know it is contemporary and African. Whatever it is, you cannot seem to look away.
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Who Is the Master, and Who Is the Slave?
I’ve seen it twice, and it still makes my brain feel like it’s been violated in some sublime way. Visually, The Master is an incredibly beautiful piece of work: the effect of filming a reported 80 percent in glorious 65mm. The movie is saturated with color and tone courtesy of cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr., with editing by Leslie Jones and Peter McNulty, who paced the visuals against Jonny Greenwood’s (of Radiohead) odd, whacked-out, jazzed-up staccato soundtrack.
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Carrying on a Political Absurdist Legacy
CHICAGO — Cartoonist Rube Goldberg (1883–1970) was best known for his depictions of “inventions” that imagined complicated contraptions with far too many moving parts built to solve the simplest of problems. These “Rube Goldberg machines” appeared in his work, and were used as devices to poke fun at the roundabout nature of American bureaucratic and political systems in the post-World War II era. Rube Goldberg’s Ghost, a large group exhibition on view at Columbia College’s small Glass Curtain Gallery (through May 4) features work by more than 20 artists who may very well be Goldberg’s companions in that they, too, enjoy laborious machinations with political undertones.
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The Museum of Everything
PARIS — For a brief time, a former Catholic seminary on Paris’ classy Boulevard Raspail was overtaken with a psychoanalyst’s jubilee of art from self-taught creators who worked in secret or seclusion, in mental asylums or hospitals, or just from their own particular perspective of the world. The Museum of Everything is a traveling exhibition started by British filmmaker James Brett in 2009 that’s been widely successful in its unique curation of overlooked art.
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Nick Cave’s Equine Exercise in Puppet Magic
I first learned about Nick Cave’s work in an undergraduate puppetry class. Puppetry, like architecture and some other disciplines, is the synthesis of a myriad of techniques both artistic and mechanical, attracting sculptors, dancers, and engineers in equal number. Similarly, Cave’s 30-strong herd of horses that visited Grand Central last week in his piece HEARD•NY, presented by MTA Arts for Transit and Creative Time, as well as the “Soundsuits” for which he gained initial recognition are genre-bending works of art: they are visual and performative wonders as well as feats of construction. Cave is the director of the Graduate Fashion Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, so while he may be an unwitting puppeteer, he is certainly no stranger to the intersections of beauty, functionality, and craftsmanship.
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The Freedom and Squalor of Life on the Open Road
If you can imagine a lovechild of Walker Evans and Larry Clark, that’s Mike Brodie. Leaving home in 2002, at 17, Brodie became infatuated with train hopping and rode freight trains on and off for seven years. Along the way, he picked up his first camera, a Polaroid, in 2004 and began photographing his travels and his friends, switching to 35mm in 2006.
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Tracing a Path from Cubism to Digital Art
I first learned about Cubism in an art history class my sophomore year of college. I remember the moment of revelation, after reading a lot about but still failing to grasp what exactly Picasso and Braque were after. In the darkened lecture hall one afternoon, our teacher summed it up this way: how sparingly could you paint a face while still having the viewer understand it as a face? What was the bare minimum required for representation? As legend has it, these questions and the art they inspired changed the course of art history forever.
Is the same true of the digital revolution? That’s the premise of Decenter, an exhibition curated Andrianna Campbell and Daniel S. Palmer and currently on view at the Abrons Arts Center.
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The Poetic Parisian Street Art of Fred le Chevalier
PARIS — As I’ve been wandering the streets of Paris this week, one artist seems to be haunting my path with his dark and elegant street art. Fred le Chevalier, as he signs his work, has paste up drawings of red-lipped pale women posed with strange creatures like owls, large cats, and anthropomorphic suns.
