(Event Ticker Requires JavaScript and Flash) Download the latest Flash player
Gilmore's Girls
Kate Gilmore appeared in this year's Whitney Biennial with the installation Standing Here, for which the artist videotaped from above her attempts, and ultimate success, breaking out of a drywall monolith. The video was paired with a sculptural prop, the broken wall. In Walk the Walk architecture returns, resilient and cumbersome as ever.
Walk the Walk took place in Bryant Park as part of the Public Art Fund's "In the Public Realm" program. It's Gilmore's first public performance, and the first in which she herself does not appear. Atop a ten-by-ten-foot yellow platform elevated eight feet from the ground, seven women pace the perimeter of the structure. The structure is populated from 8:30 until 5:30, the workday, during the show's week-long run. The women wear yellow dresses, with beige "career woman" pumps that gently pummel the cube's top. At 1:30 each day (lunch time, of course), the women switch shifts. One group descends by ladder; momentarily, the second group takes its place atop the block.
Read More
Tamy Ben-Tor, Miki Carmi at Stux Gallery, Zach Feuer
When reviewing a show, one concern is how much or how little to refer to the press release. As a rule, these texts are not generated by the artists involved, and they proffer descriptions more restricted than the work itself. The recent collaboration of performance artist Tamy Ben-Tor and painter Miki Carmi, however, requires translation. Ben-Tor's performances and video work here are conducted in several languages, including the little-spoken Georgian. The nature of the artists' collaboration is unclear even with the aid of outside texts; the release's claims that "It is through irrationality that the senses grasp truth" and "The performance of the poet is a daily act of repetitious rituals that embodies the intensified condition of being," do little to penetrate the confusion. The show is accompanied by an artist's book put out by Regency Arts Press in 2009, where the artists' intentions begin to take shape.
Read More
Lena Dunham's Open House
Filmmaker Lena Dunham treads the turbid shallows of post-college fallout. In her latest, Tiny Furniture, the artist turns the camera on herself and her immediate family. Dunham favors a sort of hybrid of allegory and docudrama, evidenced in her collaborative shorts Delusional Downtown Divas (in which childhood friends Joana Avillez, Isabel Halley and Gabriel Held play childhood friends). In her first full-length feature, Dunham again casts her own ambitions and insecurities as the star of the show. Tiny Furniture depicts a girl adrift and attempting to moor herself; the film is that moor that rescues Dunham from the ennui of a directionless year after college.
Read More
Inside/Outside the Brucennial
The revolving and evolving group of young men who go by the moniker Bruce High Quality Foundation espouses the credo, "Professional Challenges. Amateur Solutions." The group's own forays into that most impractical of professions—the contemporary artist—have taken a highly un-amateur turn. BHQF has consistently positioned itself as a hybrid, showing work as a collective while directing the grassroots educational program BHQFU whose clarion call, "That's where U come in," resounds with put-on juvenilia. The line outside last night's Brucennial opening suggests both the nameless hoards of energized youth approaching Woodstock, and the Topshop opening last year, just a few blocks due East.Read More
Fact Sheet: Ida Applebroog
Theorist Julia Kristeva once described Modernist romantic melancholy: "Abjection, recognized as welded to narcissism, has in Proust something domesticated about it." Kristeva might well have been referring to artist Ida Applbroog's most recent exhibition, Monalisa, on view now at Hauser & Wirth in New York. Here, the domesticated pets are mostly ink drawings of female genitalia. The salon- and grid-hung works featured in Monalisa feature more "whole" portraits to eerie, even pathetic figures with smudged cheeks and uncannily open eyes. This investigation is not entirely for our benefit—or, it seems, for anyone's. Monalisa presents a series of vaginal self-portraits (all 1969) made during a period of personal crisis, and one senses Applebroog's ennui in the repeated line drawings. The artist, now nearing 81, is showing at Hauser & Wirth for the first time.Read More
Or
Oil on Canvas, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
The colorful, phantasmagorical canvases of Jakub Julian Ziolkowski are full of imaginar
