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Robert Ashley Gets a New Backdrop
If there's such a thing as an "artist's composer," Robert Ashley is it. The 81-year-old opera composer and performer, who has earned a cult-like following, is credited with revitalizing the opera form for fine art crowds. He is admired for his scores, whose unorthodox formats appeal to musicians, performers and visual artists. But his underground credibility might be blown with Vidas Perfectas, a reimagining of his 1983 opera Perfect Lives. The new work opens next week at the Irondale Theater in Brooklyn.
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The Business of FriendsWithYou
A vision in smiles and stripes greets visitors at the entrance to the second phase of the High Line, on West 30th Street and 10th Avenue. Presented by AOL as part of the company's recent investment in the arts, Rainbow City by FriendsWithYou is a fairground of rotund red, blue, yellow and white balloon creatures designed to delight children and adults (with a little help from Colicchio & Sons' temporary bar, the Tap, conveniently located next door.)
Rainbow City is a traveling installation by the Miami-based conglomerate—an operative term here—that combines Sam Borkson and Arturo "Tury" Sandoval's training and interest in industrial design, engineering and sculpture. Fabricators of cutesy generic figures, FriendsWithYou draw inspiration (and a business model) from product-driven companies, and like to think of themselves as a hybrid thinktank/art collective. Their work includes children's wear, product design and interactive art, and always uses slightly retro childhood imagery, wirth sleek production.
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Out to Sea: Q+A with Sean Landers
For the last two decades, Sean Landers hasn't exactly slummed it as the leading proponent of "slacker art," the practitioners of which use confession and metaphors for misery to both self-lacerate and critique the easy pathos of popular entertainment.
Take, for instance, the immense weblike text paintings for which Landers is best known. In them, frenetic admissions seem to knowingly thwart the truth of confession and expressionism. For "Around the World Alone," currently at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York, Landers removes himself from the picture-almost. He's been replaced by that supreme symbol for both humor and melancholy, the clown, alone at sea and in various poses. In previous works, a more macho Landers has been represented as a chimp.
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.
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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.
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Stuart Hawkins says she was never any good at drawing. Upon deciding she to be an artist in the first grade, she arranged toys and stuffed animals, ev
