Richard Serra’s “Hand Catching Lead” (1968, 16 mm black-and-white film, no sound) is a strangely appealing video that functions as well in the digital era as it probably did in its own time.
Richard Serra
Posted inNews
Early Richard Serra Land Work Finally Gets Cultural Protection
Richard Serra’s “Shift,” an early land work made by the artist in 1972, has finally received the indefinite protection it deserves. The township council for King City, Ontario, voted last week to officially designate the sculpture a site of “cultural heritage value.”
Posted inNews
Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City Art World Stronghold, To Close
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — For more than 20 years, John O’Brien’s Dolphin Gallery has been a cultural and community epicenter for Kansas City artists. Located in a huge white wall space in the West Bottoms, a historical area in downtown Kansas City, the Dolphin is the size of a barn, and embodies the charisma of an established Chelsea or Chicago River North gallery.
Posted inArt
In Search of Richard Serra’s Embattled “Shift”
TORONTO — Forget “Spiral Jetty” and “Double Negative.” The most inaccessible work of Land Art is sitting in Toronto’s own backyard. Having traveled to the distant salt lake shore of Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” (1970) in Utah and spent several fruitless hours searching for Heizer’s “Double Negative” (1969) atop the arid Mormon Mesa in Nevada, I can attest to the long distances, sturdy vehicles, and functional GPS systems required to reach these sites. Unlike Richard Serra’s landmark sculpture, “Shift” (1972), however, none of them involve illegal trespassing.
Posted inNews
The Vatican Will Mount a Pavilion Exhibition at the 2013 Venice Biennale
[This post has been corrected, see below for details]
Just as Pope Francis begins his tenure at the head of the Catholic Church, the announcement comes that the Vatican will finally have its own pavilion at the Venice Biennale, themed around the Book of Genesis.
Posted inOpinion
Richard Serra Discusses Artistic Tools and Strategies
Richard Serra explains the role process has played in his artistic evolution. For the world-renowned artist it is, he explains, an integral part of his work.
Posted inArt
The Problems of North American Airport Art
BERKELEY, California — These days, we experience the world on a much more international level. Whether online or through travel, the world feels smaller to us. As this trend continues, artistic experiences hosted online, available for anyone in the world with a internet connection to access, grow increasingly diverse and interesting. Unfortunately, that same diversity can’t be ascribed to the physical counterpart of global space, where the base unit of artistic experience just might be the airport.
Posted inOpinion
The Problem with Big Art
Ossian Ward has a feature in Art in America this month about the dismaying trend of bigness in the contemporary art world. The piece is an exploration of a problem that’s only been growing (no pun intended): art as a series of bigger and better spectacles, upstaged only by the vast and cavernous spaces in which it’s shown. Though the article is quite smart and thorough, it left me a little unsatisfied: I think Ward stops short of really digging into what’s at stake here. What exactly is the problem with art as entertainment, anyway? It may seem like an obvious question, but given its centrality to this discussion, it’s one worth asking.
Posted inOpinion
5 Artists Who Anticipated Festivus
Happy Festivus everyone! What is Festivus? It is a secular holiday celebrated on December 23 as a way to celebrate the holiday season without participating in its pressures and commercialism. It was popularized by Seinfeld.
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This week’s edition of Required Reading comes a little later than usual, but aren’t all good things worth the wait? We’ll be back to our morning publishing schedule next Sunday. Enjoy the linkage.
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This week’s Required Reading has Serra at the Met, pole dancing’s relationship to art, tech’s relationship to whiteness, mud stenciling, sound art, ruminations on the art world by a bigwig at Christie’s and the art of getting high.
Posted inOpinion
Richard Serra Cleans Off Desk, Makes Art
Richard Serra may be best known for his curving steel wall sculptures, but his earlier works erred even more on the side of conceptually abstract. The artist’s 1967 “Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself” kicked off a body of work in which a single verb directly translated into art. Check out “Hands Scraping” (1968) above.
