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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
Who's on Fourth?
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his our upon the stage and then is heard no more: It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. —Macbeth, Act V, Scene V
When the international arterati descend on London at mid-month for the Frieze Art Fair, some may nip over to Trafalgar Square to catch the final hours of One & Other, Antony Gormley’s project for the Fourth Plinth. Or they may have gotten their fill of the 100-day relay, thanks to round-the-clock online coverage. Of course, they could just decide to wait for Mike Figgis’s documentary, scheduled to air on Sky Arts television later in the fall. But we get ahead of our story.
Between July 6 and Oct. 14, 2,400 souls who r… Read More
Or
Butt Johnson's "Untitled Floral Pastiche" series consists of four drawings, each of which is organized around a different flower. Johnsons had long co
