The impetus for the Bushwick Open Studios weekend is the concept of the “open studio.” It’s an opportunity for artists, curators and dealers to visit and talk to artists about their work in their spaces. But this past weekend, 56 Bogart Street served as a microcosm of the new Bushwick, where dealers with commercial galleries and artists with studios were presenting work to the public together, creating a larger event in which artists and dealers were functioning both in concert and at cross purposes at the same time.
Reviews
Posted inArt
The Part of Bushwick Open Studios that is Actually Ridgewood
Despite its name, the sprawling weekend (June 1–3) of Bushwick Open Studios actually overtakes the bounds of one neighborhood into the greater North Brooklyn art scene, including some spaces in another borough entirely.
Posted inBooks
Time Out
“A literary event!” — every middlebrow doorstop of a novel gets saddled with that cliché. You’d think aesthetic significance could be determined by weight. Or that literature had no other time frame than that of the publishers’ seasonal catalogue, destined to wait a bit longer to be trashed than the daily paper, but not by much.
Nonetheless, something I’m prepared to call a literary event did take place earlier this year, when in its issue of February 9 the London Review of Books published a twenty-part poem or sequence by Denise Riley, “A Part Song.”
Posted inArt
The Mysteries of One, Two, Three
This is what a small group of people — most of them artists living in and around New York — know. Xylor Jane is a singular figure, and her widely spaced exhibitions are regarded as events.
Posted inBooks
Crossed Signals: Brian Evenson’s Stories Blend Genre and Literary Conventions
Brian Evenson’s writing might well be, in the words of a character from his new story collection Windeye, published by the venerable Coffee House Press, a means of “capturing on paper and holding steady and immobile the various motions and bodies that constitute an event.” The twenty-five new stories collected here are all event-driven, narratives spurred into life by mysterious disappearances, communal meetings, or acts of stomach-churning violence.
Posted inArt
Lucian Freud’s Wrong Turn
I recall the 1993-1994 Lucian Freud retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as possibly the dreariest exhibition I’d ever seen there.
Posted inArt
Finding Common Ground at City Hall
City Hall Park’s newest exhibit has artists realizing public monuments as acts of memorial and common experience, as well as shared moments of public art whimsy.
Posted inArt
Pop Goes the Easel: Roy Lichtenstein’s Retrospective
CHICAGO — The Roy Lichtenstein exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) is everything a retrospective should be. It takes an incontrovertibly significant artist, assembles art from all phases of his career, includes well-known and less well-known works and tries to make the case for an oeuvre, as opposed to a succession of unconnected objects. If you like Lichtenstein’s work, you will love this show.
Posted inArt
When Controversy and Failure Become Art
In the exhibition Canceled: Alternative Manifestations and Productive Failures at the Center for Book Arts, the documents, language and narrative of controversy, censorship and failure become a new form of work to consider.
Posted inArt
K8 Hardy, Please Sashay Away
Fashion as a basis for genuine artistic work may be dead. Even when it’s properly approached and used, as in Cindy Sherman’s fashion editorial series or the early installations of artists-cum-couturiers Zowie Broach and Brian Kirkby under the Boudicca label, I tend to find that the medium isn’t being mined for all its potential. Photographer K8 Hardy’s “Untitled Runway Show,” a performance piece mounted on May 20 as part of her work in the Whitney Biennial, seems to have proven that in the hands of popular contemporary artists, fashion in a museum can be as nauseating as the debauchery on display at Fashion’s Night Out.
Posted inMusic
Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (May 2012)
This week, reviews of Esperanza Spalding, Madonna, Black Dice, Spoek Mathambo, All-American Rejects, Rusko, Jack White and Chromatics.
Posted inArt
A Man Without a Camera
Marco Breuer is best known for the photographs that he makes without using a camera. (He does other sorts of photography, but this body of work is largely what we know about his endeavors). Rather than pointing at a moment that is gone, and wresting fixity from flux, as photographs are said to do, Breuer acknowledges the triumph of instability, with its attendant manifestations of destruction and demise.
