Tag Archives: exhibition

MOVING TARGETS: THE WORK OF LAURA POITRAS

Great piece from ArtForum on the Laura Poitras exhibition at the Whitney. Includes excerpts from her diaries.

MOVING TARGETS: THE WORK OF LAURA POITRAS by Stephen Squibb – artforum.com

excerpt from diaries:

By asking people to lie down in Bed Down Location, I want them to enter an empathetic space and imagine drone warfare—not simply to understand it from news articles but to ponder the sky and imagine that there is a machine flying above you that could end your life at any moment. What does that feel like? Many people in the world are living under skies where that is a reality. [read article]

Holland Cotter in the NY Times also has a good, informative review

Images from Laura Poitras’s “Anarchist” series, which are drawn from documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden.

[The title, Astro Noise, refers to the faint background disturbance of thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang and is the name Edward Snowden gave to an encrypted file containing evidence of mass surveillance by the National Security Agency that he shared with Poitras in 2013. ]

 

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]

Garry Winogrand

The first major Garry Winogrand retrospective since 1988 is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until Sept. 21

Born in the Bronx, Winogrand did much of his best-known work in Manhattan during the 1950s and 1960s, and in both the content and dynamic style he became one of the principal voices of the eruptive postwar decades. Known primarily as a street photographer, Winogrand, who is often associated with famed contemporaries Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, photographed with dazzling energy and incessant appetite, exposing some 26,000 rolls of film in his short lifetime. He photographed business moguls, everyday women on the street, famous actors and athletes, hippies, politicians, soldiers, animals in zoos, rodeos, car culture, airports, and antiwar demonstrators and the construction workers who beat them bloody in view of the unmoved police. Daily life in America—rich with new possibilities and yet equally anxiety-ridden and threatening to spin out of control—seemed to unfold for him in a continuous stream.

READINGS

Document, Protest, Memorial: AIDS in the Art World

Document, Protest, Memorial: AIDS in the Art World
by Barbara Pollock, ARTnews

It’s been three decades since AIDS first made an impact on the New York art world, annihilating a community and activating one of the most highly effective artist-driven political movements of the 20th century. At that time, for every Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres lost to the disease, there were scores of lesser-known artists, such as Ray Navarro, Hugh Steers, and Robert Blanchon, who also left their mark with art that documented, protested, memorialized, and reinterpreted the devastation of the era. [read rest of article]

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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Crows in the Dining Room and Other Messy Histories

Fascinating Installation interventions by Valerie Hegerty at the Brooklyn Museum.

Crows in the Dining Room and Other Messy HistoriesCrows in the Dining Room and Other Messy Histories

In three of the period rooms at the Brooklyn Museum, something is amiss. When visitors step into the cutout nook that offers a view of the Cane Acres Plantation dining room, they find, rather than the usual placid and civilized scene, one slightly more mad: crows have descended upon the dinner table. They are pecking at brightly colored globs of fruit strewn on the table, attacking the paintings, and leaving crumbs everywhere. Meanwhile, in the parlor of the Cupola House, George Washington’s face has fallen grossly out of his portrait, while a Native American–patterned rug decays on the floor below. In the hall of the same house, a painting and furniture are studded with nasty holes, which look like bullet wounds that have oxidized.

Click to read more and see more images

 

Mike Kelley @ PS1

MoMA PS1: Exhibitions: Mike Kelley
A show not be missed (until Feb 2, 2014).  I was very inspired by this show. Mike Kelley was an incredibly prolific artist that was not afraid to take risks—he did not hold back and followed his ideas and passions.

Mike Kelley @ PS1

From the PS1 website:
Born in Detroit, Kelley lived and worked in Los Angeles from the mid-1970s until his tragic death last year at the age of 57. Over his thirty-five year career, he worked in every conceivable medium—drawings on paper, sculpture, performances, music, video, photography, and painting. Speaking of his early work and artistic concerns at large, Kelley had said, “My entrance into the art world was through the counter-culture, where it was common practice to lift material from mass culture and ‘pervert’ it to reverse or alter its meaning… Mass culture is scrutinized to discover what is hidden, repressed, within it.” Through his art, Kelley explored themes as diverse as American class relations, sexuality, repressed memory, systems of religion and transcendence, and post-punk politics. He brought to these subjects both incisive critique and abundant, self-deprecating humor.

Kelley’s work did not develop along a purely linear trajectory. Instead, he returned time and again to certain underlying themes—the shapes lurking underneath the carpet, as it were—including repressed memories, disjunctions between selfhood and social structures as well as fault lines between the sacred and the profane. The work Kelley produced throughout his life was marked by his extraordinary powers of critical reflection, relentless self-examination, and a creative—and surprising—repurposing of ideas and materials.

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Reviews and More Info:
Official Mike Kelley Website
Mike Kelley at Art 21 (video interview and more)

Review by Holland Cotter in the New TImes
Review by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker
Review by Ben Davis in Blouin ArtInfo

Brazil’s Protests, on and Off the Wall

Brazil’s Protests, on and Off the Wall

Not only are these incredible photographs, but Foto Protesto SP puts the photographs back in the streets.

..A group called Foto Protesto SP was posting the images publicly, scenes from the demonstrations and clashes that swept through Brazil earlier this year. They wanted to make sure the protests would not be forgotten as people went about their daily, and rushed, routine.

..“It was a process of occupying the city with photography,” said Mr. Lima, a freelance photographer for The New York Times. “And, because it is an artistic intervention, it didn’t even come to mind for us that getting permission would be necessary for this to happen.”

read entire article and see more photos