Fact Sheet: Jay DeFeo

Jay DeFeo (1929–1989) is best known for the her obsessively reworked, giant abstract painting, The Rose, which she completed between the years of 1958 and 1966 until it had to be removed from her home with a crane. It's a striking, sublime amount of labor—it's also a strange monument to a woman artist spending extreme amounts of time isolated in her home. DeFeo is one of the few women associated with the California Beat Generation of the 1950s and 1960s: It's rumored that she changed her name to Jay so that people in the art world would mistake her for a man. As The Rose might suggest, DeFeo was a prolific producer—but in a surprising variety of media, including photography and drawing. Her work was often abstract and emotional, but show evidence of DeFeo's meticulous and compulsive process. Here are the facts on DeFeo:
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Five From the Whitney Biennial: Martin Kersels

"This is a funny guy" was the this unsolicited comment offered to me by a visitor to the Whitney Biennial as he contemplated 5 Songs, the sculpture-cum-performance set by Martin Kersels, installed in the museum's lobby. A miniature stage composed of five orange, black and white movable modules, the piece emanates a sense of hedonist pleasure realized through glam-on-a-budget fantasy. The modules include a Laugh-In worthy dance cage replete with a few hanging beads, and a performance platform with a built in prop room, stocked with all manner of rock accoutrements, including fright wigs and (should the need arise) a lint roller. The overall effect is Minimalist sculpture hijacked by a 1980s heavy metal cover band—artistic paternity in the hands of someone who can take a joke.

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Top Ten From the Armory Show Modern

1. FAURSCHOU (COPENHAGEN, BEIJING)

What more can you ask of the Armory Show Modern than to provide a few transcendent moments with some art-historical significance and a bit of emotional depth? This booth's display graciously fulfilled the request with a large, sumptuous 1964 Picasso painting from his "Artist and Model" series, hanging near an evidently precious but rather abject sculpture, a heap of sunflower seeds piled neatly on the carpet (Ai Weiwei's 2009 Sunflower Seeds). On the wall just above the seed mound was another surprise, a lush and brooding 1895 seascape by Edvard Munch. Completing the scene was a splashy Georg Baselitz canvas and a monumental Robert Rauschenberg painting that covered the entire back wall. Rigorous and austere yet generous in its invitation for viewers to free-associate among wildly diverse, century-spanning visual languages, the presentation offered the kind of unique art experience that makes the circuitous and sometimes arduous trek to the Armory Show worthwhile.

PICTURED: AI WEIWEI, SUNFLOWER SEEDS, 2009. COURTESY FAURSCHOU GALLERY.

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McDermott and McGough Compromise With the Past

Some people worry that art is stuck in the past—McDermott & McGough wouldn't have it any other way. For three decades, the artist duo have immersed themselves for years at a time in bygone eras: renovating a Gilded Age apartment, say, or an Eighteenth-Century farmhouse upstate, and assiduously building a period-appropriate lifestyle around it. They've made art objects, but this sustained performance comprises a quiet rebellion against everything that is shoddy, tasteless, frantic, and mass-produced in contemporary American life, and it may be their biggest statement.
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