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At the Altar of Saint Genet
Gold leaf, honey, tar, blood, wax, flowers, leeches, pheasants, arrows: such are the materials used by Seattle-based experimental theater company Saint Genet, whose new work Paradisiacal Rites opens at Seattle performance space On The Boards this week. The company returned in early May from Krems, Austria, where the piece made its lauded debut at the Donau Arts Festival. The show combines dance, installation and original music, typical of past work such as The Dorothy K-a piece Robert Wilson included in his "Works and Process" series at New York's Guggenheim Museum in 2011. Read More
Oldenburg's Pure Pleasures at MoMA
"Pastry and art are two forms of pleasure. If you combine them, you get two times the pleasure," Claes Oldenburg said at today's press preview for his two-part show, "Claes Oldenburg: The Street and the Store" and "Claes Oldenburg: Mouse Museum/Ray Gun Wing," at New York's Museum of Modern Art (Apr. 14-Aug. 5). The statement carries much of the same simplicity and appeal that runs throughout the artist's work. Read More
The Teachings of Vaginal Davis
Since the early 1980s, the genre- and gender-bending Vaginal Davis has been a queer performance artist, activist, front woman for art punk band The Afro Sisters, muse to Bruce LaBruce, writer for LA Weekly and Artforum, and lecturer at institutions like Princeton and Vassar. Earlier this month Davis opened "HAG—small, contemporary, haggard," her first show of purely visual art at Participant Inc. in New York.
In the middle of the empty gallery, Davis constructed a chamber with a distorted perspectival system (called an Ames room). The illusion seems like a metaphor for Davis's mutable personality, which can be overstated or demure, and her fixed stature—6'6", without heels.
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Boetti's Changing Rules: Christian Rattemeyer on 'Game Plan'
For the past three years, "Game Plan," the retrospective of Italian artist Alighiero Boetti, has been the collaborative focus of three curators at some of the world's most prestigious arts institutions. After opening at Madrid's Reina Sofía in late 2011 and showing at London's Tate Modern earlier this year, the show comes to the top floor and atrium of MoMA in New York this July.
An Arte Povera pioneer, Boetti sought to transcend the traditional limits of high art through industrial materials used in minimalist constructions, such as in his work Io Che Prendo il Sole a Torino il 19 Gennaio, 1969 (Me Sunbathing in Turin 19 January, 1969)—a gravelike configuration of hand-formed concrete chunks, which rests on the ground in the shape of a human figure. Wood, cardboard, glass, and postal materials comprise the varied mediums the artist elevated to art objects during this period in the late 1960s. Having never identified as a sculptor, however, Boetti saw the rapid accumulation of these materials as constricting his means of visual communication.
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Mixed Media, 212 x 66 inches, Courtesy the artist.
Artist Kirstine Roepstorff was born and trained in Denmark, but lives and works in Berli
