Your Own Personal Jesus

The New York art community has been gathering for a spate of panels and programs on museum practices, all prompted by two concurrent exhibitions that could not be more dissimilar. At the Museum of Modern Art is “Marina Abramovi´c: The Artist is Present” [through May 31], a chronologically ordered retrospective of four decades of performance and its documentation, with a new piece ongoing in the museum’s giant fishbowl of an atrium, where the charismatic artist is seated silently at a table for what will amount to some 700 hours. Visitors are invited to sit across from her and experience her presence. The piece gives the exhibition its subtitle, and might even be a preemptiveresponse to anticipated controversy. For the show also includes live reperformances of five historical pieces by a crew of three dozen surrogates, all trained by Abramovi´c at her home in Chatham, NY. The show’s curator is MoMA/PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach, formerly chief curator of the museum’s department of media and performance. The museum’s mission is to collect, preserve and educate. How to do that with time-based live art? Should it be done? Is reperformance an acceptable answer?
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Livin' Le Vide Loco

The Guggenheim Museum invites you to honor, with all your affective presence, the lucid and positive advent of a certain reign of the sensitive. This manifestation of perceptive synthesis confirms Tino Sehgal’s pictorial quest for an ecstatic and immediately communicable emotion.

No, wait a second. That historical invitation actually bore the name of Iris Clert, the infinitely forbearing Paris dealer, while the questing artist was Yves Klein, who confounded gallery-goers on an April evening in 1958 with the opening of his show “Le Vide”—The Void. Clert’s little gallery was utterly empty. Visitors imbibed blue cocktails, causing them to, well, void azure pee the following day. In the painting-dominated 1950s, just about any rebellio… Read More

Making it

Piss Christ, the X Portfolio and now Spiritual America: the culture wars have a new Bull Run. On Sept. 30, days before the public opening of Tate Modern's exhibition "Pop Life: Art in a Material World" [through Jan. 17], Scotland Yard ordered the removal of Richard Prince's 1983 page-size rephotograph of Gary Gross's 1976 skin mag picture of the 10-year-old Brooke Shields-nude, masked in mommy's make-up (if mommy was a female impersonator), hard little torso glistening and queerly reminiscent of Donatello's David. London's constabulary had been alerted to the offending image by early reviews of the show. (Who says art criticism has no impact today?) It may be pertinent that the police raid followed on the heels of the Sept. 26 arres… Read More

Action Painting/Motion Pictures

Commercial movies have long been the foil and fodder for artists working with video and film. By comparison, few have found anything of interest in the history of painting.

 

It’s been more than half a century since Allan Kaprow proposed that the best thing to do with the legacy of Jackson Pollock was to jettison the painting part and hang on to the action. Performance—live, filmed, taped—has claimed a seat at the visual arts table pretty much ever since, while painting, undead, fitfully resurgent, has moved in and out of the conversation. During this half-century of an ascendant time-based art, but particularly in the last two decades, feature-length commercial films have been the foil and fodder for artists aspiring to displays … Read More