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Cartoon Studio: Q+A With Joyce Pensato
Joyce Pensato's current show at Friedrich Petzel is titled "Batman Returns," but it might have been called "The Return of the Repressed." Along with a generous sampling of recent paintings and drawings of Batman and other cartoon character heads and masks in her signature style of aggressive strokes and drips, Pensato includes detritus from the Brooklyn studio she was forced to vacate last spring after 32 years of occupancy, allowing visitors to see the traces of her private creative process.
Whole walls were removed and sections put on display, along with stapled and paint-covered photographs, piles of broken furniture, soiled stuffed animals and oddball knick-knacks that have been her inspiration over the years. All of these items are covered, more or less, in splattered paint, so that the entire exhibition resembles a giant Joyce Pensato tableau.
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At Radio City, Antony is a Shaman
An enraptured audience stood applauding and whistling for five full minutes, without a curtain call or encore, following "Swanlights," Antony and the Johnson's performance at Radio City Music Hall Thursday night, commissioned by New York's Museum of Modern Art. For some 90 minutes, Antony, his distinctive vocals complemented by a coordinated light show and evocative sets, delivered new arrangements (by Rob Moose, Nico Muhly and Maxim Moston) of songs selected from the course of his career.
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Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011)
Helen Frankenthaler, the pioneering American abstractionist, whose preferred technique of staining thinned paints into unprimed canvas became the hallmark of Color Field painting, died today at her home in Darien, Conn. She was 83.
Born to wealthy New Yorkers, Frankenthaler attended high school at New York's Dalton School (1945) and college at Bennington in Vermont, studying with Paul Feeley and graduating in 1949. In 1950 she met Clement Greenberg, and a five-year-long relationship with the influential New York critic ensued. Equally significant for the young artist was her friendship with the New York School poet and curator Frank O'Hara, whom she met in 1951 and remained close to until his death in 1966. Frankenthaler and O'Hara were among the brilliant artists and poets associated with Tibor de Nagy Gallery, directed in the 1950s by John Bernard Myers; she had her first solo show there in 1951. She was friends with all the major Abstract Expressionist painters, and in 1958 married Robert Motherwell. They divorced in 1971.
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OMA Triumphs at Cornell
Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y., has just boosted its architectural profile with a sensitive expansion to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, I.M. Pei's concrete-and-glass modernist jewel of 1973, and the near-completion of the 48,000-square-foot Milstein Hall, a brand-new facility for the College of Architecture designed by OMA partners Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu. It is a return of sorts for Koolhaas, who studied for a year at Cornell in 1972, when the Johnson Museum was under construction.
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Performa Playbill: Liz Magic Laser
Borrowing her techniques from 20th-century radical theater and her dialogue from the news, Liz Magic Laser mounted the excellent production "I Feel Your Pain," a Performa 11 commission, on Nov. 13 and 14. A faculty member at the School of Visual Arts, Laser took over SVA's theater facility, an ex-cinema on 23rd Street in Chelsea, where she projected live video feeds on the giant screen and skillfully engaged audience members in a biting and often hilarious satire of contemporary political and media culture in the U.S.
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Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, a city with one museum and one major gallery, Nick Van Woert's mixed-media practice evolved from doodles, dra
