Tag Archives: conceptual art

Cindy Sherman: ‘Why am I in these photos?’

Cindy Sherman: ‘Why am I in these photos?’| The Guardian

Photographer Cindy Sherman talks about a difficult childhood, her compulsion to dress up, growing older – and why she now prefers to live alone.

…”A flick through the photographs in her current retrospective exhibition in LA reveals her transformed into 20 kinds of matinee starlet, Hitchcock lead, pneumatic Monroe, terrified centrefold, crime-scene corpse, old master muse, cut-up sex doll, Republican wife, clown; both as determinedly absent and iconically present in her work as Andy Warhol once was in his.” [read entire article]

Cindy Sherman in front of her work at the Broad museum, Los Angeles, where a major retrospective of her work is taking place. Photograph: Dan Tuffs for the Observer

Social in Practice – Superflex

Superflex’s Hospital Equipment Goes to Gaza
—artnet News

“Casualties of recent fighting in the Gaza Strip may well find themselves undergoing surgery atop an operating table that is also an artwork. In what the three-man Danish collective Superflex calls a “readymade upside-down,” the artists organized for a museum exhibition of top-of-the-line medical equipment which then went to a setting defined less by well-heeled visitors than by life-threatening injuries.

 As a result, Al-Shifa Hospital is the beneficiary of some $90,000 worth of goods,..” read more

Faith Ringgold Looks Back on Her Life in Art, Activism, and Education

Faith Ringgold photographed in New Jersey on Nov 23, 2015. KATHERINE MCMAHON

“[I realized] I can’t tell your story, I can only tell mine. I can’t be you, I can only be me,”

An important and inspiring read with need to know history > The Storyteller: At 85, Her Star Still Rising, Faith Ringgold Looks Back on Her Life in Art, Activism, and Education

Faith Ringgold, The American People Series #20: Die, 1967.

Ringgold’s original plan had been to study art. But when she showed up at City College’s School of Liberal Arts, she was informed that it did not admit women. “They’re sitting there trying to make me understand that I cannot get a liberal arts degree there,” she said, “and I am refusing to understand. And out of it, one woman says”—Ringgold dropped her voice to a whisper—“ ‘She can do it. Let me tell you how. She can [enroll in the School of Education] and major in art.’ ”

Faith Ringgold, Tar Beach, 1988.

www.faithringgold.com

Source: The Storyteller: At 85, Her Star Still Rising, Faith Ringgold Looks Back on Her Life in Art, Activism, and Education | ARTnews

 

 

IS THERE LIFE ON MARS? GOODBYE TO DAVID BOWIE

Many posts on the great David Bowie and his impact on popular culture and the arts. He was fearless and one of my personal heroes “for [more than] one day.” His retrospective David Bowie is that I saw in Berlin was one of the most memorable exhibitions I have seen in recent years. He was fearless is his art, seemingly not afraid to fail by trying something new —  an inspiration.

IS THERE LIFE ON MARS? GOODBYE TO BOWIE BY JACK HALBERSTAM | Bully Bloggers
(One of best pieces I have read)

“…For me, as for so many, David Bowie represented a glittering, odd, unearthly reminder that life is about change, risk, madness and mayhem, and that while our domestic structures work hard to keep the madness at bay, we must be ready at all times to “turn and face the strange.”… “

And Bully Bloggers is a great blog to follow: “The Bully Bloggers are a queer word art group.  We write about everything queer, so, pretty much everything.  Politics, culture, etiquette, vampires, cartoons, the news, philosophy, utopia and revolution.  This blog is our Bully Pulpit; we preach to the converted, the unconverted and the indifferent.  We are very serious, but in a silly sort of way. ”

and here is a great slideshow of the many David Bowies.

And his goodbye..

Walid Raad

Unreliable Informants: A Walid Raad Primer [Hyperallergic]

A survey exhibition dedicated the work of Walid Raad, at the Museum of Modern Art, Oct 12, 2015-Jan 16 2016

Walid Raad was born in Lebanon in 1967, eight years before that country was rent by civil war. In a precursor to the ongoing bloodshed in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the conflict dragged on for fifteen years, claiming more than 100,000 lives and creating a million refugees.

… Raad has taken up the tradition of artist-as-trickster — a role carried into modern art though the Dadaist antics of Marcel Duchamp’s transgender alter-ego, Rrose Sélavy — while reaching even farther back to the artist-as-historian-cum-fabulist. Some works trip you up and others leave you out in the cold. [ read more ]

 

Trevor Paglen

 Can an Artist Take on the Government (and Win)? A Q&A With Trevor Paglen
  Artspace

The artist and “Citizenfour” collaborator’s new show at Chelsea’s Metro Pictures is both an homage to Edward Snowden and an example of what he calls “institutional improvement.”

Trevor Paglen has tracked secret spy satellites, photographed so-called “black sites” like Area 51, cataloged hundreds of classified codes for military operations and their associated (and often bizarre) patches, and blasted images into space for the benefit of future civilizations or a visiting alien species. … Paglen approaches art with a steadfastly interdisciplinary and collaborative mindset, combining his academic training with an eye for aesthetics and a healthy dose of post-9/11 paranoia. [read interview]

Un Chien Andalou – THE GAME!!

Slicing Up Eyeballs in a Surrealist Game

The startling 1929 surrealist silent film Un Chien Andalou made by Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Salvador Dalí is now a deeply unsettling video game. If the infamous eye slicing scene makes you recoil at its memory, wait until a digital moon soundtracked by hideous stretching noises morphs into a gaping oculus, and your only release from its revolting gaze is to slash it down the pupil.

via Hyperallergic

[interesting to think of this project in relation to Perry Bard’s Man with a Movie Camera: A Global Remake.]

Artist Statements

It’s that time of the semester to work on artist statements.

An artist statement is a general introduction of your work as an artist. It is the what, how, and why of your work, from your own perspective.

Some Resources:

 

MICHAEL SCHMIDT

Michael Schmidt

On May 24, 3 days after he received the Prix Pictet, Michael Shmdit died.. The award this year  focused on consumption. [see NY TIMES article]. The Prix Pichetet site has a great post  about him.  A quote:
Michael Schmidt once called himself a ‘blind alley’ photographer, “… that means that I stroll straight into a cul-de-sac and can’t find a way out. Then I come to terms with this as a sort of condition and at some point later on, I’m back on the outside again. (…) That is to say, failure or making mistakes is an integral part of my way of working.”

MICHAEL SCHMIDT | AMERICAN SUBURB X. has several of his series posted. [bookmark American Suburb blog – excellent resource.]

obituary from the BBC

Eva Respini (MoMA) and Mark Durant (St. Lucy) talking about Robert Heinecken

Great interview on the Saint Lucy blog with Eva Respini, curator of the MOMA exhibition on  Robert Heinecken. 

Launched in 2011 by Mark Alice Durant, Saint Lucy is devoted to writing about photography and contemporary art. He co-wrote  Robert Heinecken: A Material History in 2003.

They talk about much more than Robert Heinecken, but here is a taste of their thoughts on Heinecken:

MAD: Heinecken’s opposition to narrow definitions of what it meant to be a photographic artist manifested itself in many ways. One of them is this iterative process you talk about which I assume came from his training as a printmaker.  Looking at the show downstairs, one of the things that really strikes me, just how many layers we look through to the work.  There are frames within frames, there are palimpsest pieces, incisions, and interruptions in the supposed transparency of photography, which was embraced and canonized at MoMA and much of east coast photographers, critics and academics.

ER:  When I go through the show it still amazes me how unafraid he was in terms of using new technology, new materials, new processes and as you say, layering them on top of one another.  Anytime something came out, some new material or camera, Heinecken was experimenting with it immediately in such an uninhibited way. [ read entire interview ]

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