Art in America - Most Recent News Posts

Rob Pruitt, Super-Sized

Christopher Bollen — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:00:00 +0100

Many in the art world will tell you that this is still not the time for a grand gesture. Evidently artist Rob Pruitt and his gallerist Gavin Brown did not get that message. This fall, our favorite bad-boy neo-pop artist continues to create his particular batch of flamboyant visual mayhem-but this time he's doing so on a massive scale. Not only is his solo show, "Pattern and Degradation," inaugurating Brown's recently expanded gallery space, which now stretches an entire West Village block on Leroy Street, but it's even spilling over into Michele Maccarone's neighboring gallery.

The Serious Joke: The Objects of Jay Heikes

Kimberly Chou — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0100

For the past five years, Jay Heikes' work has revolved around one big joke. In the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the artist showed stills from a video that showed him as a stand-up comic, puppet in hand, telling a joke about a pirate and its obstinate parrot. Shot in one take while Heikes was finishing graduate school at Yale, So There's This Pirate (2005) follows the parrot's refusal to obey its owner and the pirate's resultant identity crisis, mimicking the artist's constant evaluation of his own work.

Vested Histories: Shinique Smith

Aimee Walleston — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:00:00 +0100

An intrinsically disembodied medium, fabric connotes apparel. Yet what it suggests—nudity and erotic intimacy; the line in the sand between profanity and propriety—seems almost too loaded to be properly unpacked. Fabric seems to always ask "who?" As in: who wore it, owned it, discarded it, designed it, sweatshopped it, mass-marketed it, knocked it off, etc. When fabric is used in the construction of an artwork, this whisper of "who" follows the work, disrupt the object's autonomy. In the case of artist Shinique Smith, whose sculptural work primarily comprises used clothing, re-configuration and re-contextualization are uncertain steps toward that autonomy.

The Road to Somewhere

Karen Archey — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:45:00 +0100

To get to the elusive Mildred's Lane, in Beach Lake, Pennsylvania, one must drive 100 miles northwest of Manhattan, moving from the highway to increasingly poorly-marked roads; then to dirt roads, and finally a hand-drawn sign for a half-mile-long driveway through woods and ferns. On the other side is a sloping clearing dotted with small buildings, finished and unfinished artistic and architectural projects, one newly constructed residence, and a slumping two-story home that dates to the 1830s.

Nate Lowman Does It for the Kids

Kimberly Chou — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 12:00:00 +0100

Lowman's new installation, "Stay in School," is about education, good, bad, and lacking. And as part of NYU's Steinhardt School, 80WSE Windows overlooks the student-heavy Washington Square Park. Lowman depicts young people for young people.

Basquiat: Behind the Interview

Kimberly Chou — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:00:00 +0100

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, out in select theaters today in New York, draws on before-unseen footage of filmmaker Tamra Davis in conversation with the artist. The documentary also revisits what was once thought to be the only existing video-taped interview with Basquiat: a 1982 interview at his Crosby Street studio, conducted by Paul Tschinkel and Marc Miller of video magazine ART/new york. Over the years, this Basquiat interview has become best known for "awkward moments," in which Basquiat cries racism.

Body Double

Kristen Chappa — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 10:00:00 +0100

The Whitney Museum's show of contemporary work, "Off the Wall," opened last week, the most recent in a slew of institutional attempts to preserve and display performance. Featuring 30 performative actions of work authored from 1946 to the present, curator Chrissie Iles' survey focused on performance-based works that marshal the body as an artistic medium or tool, employing the museum's architecture as a stage, and disorienting that site in the process. The show extends issues raised by Marina Abramović's "The Artist Is Present" at MoMA. Both exhibitions foreground the ways the performer manifests in the exhibition space, and how their presence mediates the viewer's experience.

The Streets of Moscow

Alice Pfeiffer — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:00:00 +0100

Since the assimilation of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and now perhaps reaching its pinnacle as Jeffrey Deitch prepares his programming at MoCA, street art has been a part of contemporary art around the world. But the institutionalization of the form still is a novelty for Russia, where there is a small underground graffiti scene, but only the best-known—like Misha Most or Valery Chtak—have had gallery exhibitions, and remained marginal. This, the Moscow International Biennial for Young Art 2010 has decided to redress.

Greater Idols

Sarah Stephenson — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 10:00:00 +0100

Cookies, a Botticelli monograph and gold jumpsuits are just some of the disparate objects currently located in PS1's rotating gallery space. Curated by ICI (Independent Curators International) director Kate Fowle, the backroom features a temporary archive of objects and documents contributed by 40 of the Greater New York artists to represent the major influences in their work.

Living Landmark

Cameron Shaw — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:00:00 +0100

Life is Art Collective occupy the restaurant, originally in the Eiffel Tower, which was relocated to New Orleans. Kirsha Kaechele, Tora Lopez, Elliott Coon, and Pamala Bishop moved in on May 22 and will not leave the grounds until late June. While one goal is to redesign the interior and cultivate a biodynamic garden to support a forthcoming supper club and lounge, the women also exist daily as a living installation.

In Basel: New Jerseyy State of Mind

Aimee Walleston — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:00:00 +0100

For their first exhibition, in 2008, Basel's New Jerseyy art space opened a boxing gym. Curated by John Armleder and armed with a passel of his students, the gym held organized workouts and set up a few matches between artists. Since then, the space, founded by curator Daniel Baumann and artists Tobias Madison, Emanuel Rossetti, and graphic designer Dan Solbach, has presented shows that combine better-known contemporary artists—Cory Archangel recently partnered with the crew at No Soul for Sale at the Tate Modern—and community-based projects.

Early Statement: Edit Oderbolz Draws in Air

Quinn Latimer — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:00:00 +0100

This week Edit Oderbolz's canvas-like walls will be just a little bit smaller, when her installation for the Art Statements section of Art Basel, in which a curated selection of galleries showcase notable single-artist installations, goes on view in one of the fair's pale, square booths. The constellation of new works that the artist will present (with Lullin + Ferrari, her Zürich gallery), employ her regular materials-skinny railing, brightly hued fabric, glass-and her always discursive and distinct line. "The main work I will be showing is based on an installation I did with curtain-rails that are torn out of the bar.

History Books

Alice Pfeiffer — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:10:00 +0100

Anselm Kiefer's (b. 1945) work brings to mind ruins and monuments, canvases coated with crumbling impasto, lead, tar and straw to depict the rich, mythical mnemonic layers of tragedy and regeneration. Yet a small-scale, even understated side of the artist is currently revealed at the Yvon Lambert gallery in Paris. "Unfruchtbare Landschaften" ("Barren Landscapes") is an exhibition that for the first time shows books made by the painter at the aged 24, in late 60s Germany.

Bridges Across Canal

Brienne Walsh — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0100

In homage to the permeability of even this country's densest neighborhood, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's installation Avenue of the Americas occupies an undeveloped lot near the Holland Tunnel, where Canal, Varick, Grand, and Sixth Avenue intersect. The exhibition, which includes four commissioned works by Julieta Aranda, Carlos Motta and David Sanin Paz, Judi Werthein and Carla Zaccanigni, is easy to miss, enclosed as it is by a chain link fence next to the entrance to the 1 train. The works here address issues of Latin American's cultural history and identity as it has evolved since the beginning of the Cold War, when Sixth Avenue was renamed the Avenue of the Americas by Fiorello H. LaGuardia in 1945 to honor "Pan-American ideals and principles."

Louise Bourgeois in 1983

AiA Staff — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 15:00:00 +0100

Louise Bourgeois died May 31, and by that time her reputation was established as a mentor for multiple generations and an innovator in the fields of sculpture, feminism, and living the life of the artist. Established but not sealed, because Bourgeois' work encomasses such a rich variety of media and theme. In 1983, on the occasion of the artist's exhibition at the Museum of Modern and before Bourgeois' ascent to grand dame, Robert Storr discussed her "non-career."

The Museum That Doesn't Sleep

Kristen Chappa — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 07:00:00 +0100

As the foremost practitioner of a type of de-materialized institutional critique, Michael Asher is known to call aesthetic spaces into question by manipulating predetermined elements found just behind (and sometimes including) their white walls. For the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Asher's untitled, altered readymade is an extension of the museum's public hours, keeping it open around the clock.

No Rest for the Weary

Aimee Walleston — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:10:00 +0100

What makes a painter paint? And what transforms the application of paint into a painting? Those questions, among other epistemologies, are at the nexus of Minnesota-born artist JJ PEET's current show of work, The Sunday Painter, at Miami Diet. PEET compares himself with contemporaries in the worlds of marketing and advertising, to determine that the identity of a painter is, historically, a radical act of self-definition. Being a contemporary painter means building an interior psychological structure that houses the belief in creative autonomy divorced from mass-produced commodity, imagines the artist.

Above Ground Film

Kimberly Chou — Fri, 14 May 2010 08:00:00 +0100

Tonight at Anthology Film Archives in New York, Migrating Forms—the art-meets-cinema form born from the former New York Underground Film Festival—returns for its second annual year. Migrating Forms opens with Kevin Jerome Everson's Erie (2010), a collection of single-take shots depicting black American life in communities around the Great Lakes. The festival closes on the May 23 with new videos by Stanya Kahn that examine the artist's relationships with her mother and a friend, and finally, herself (Sandra, 2009; Kathy, 2009; It's Cool, I'm Good, 2010).

Swiss Slapstick

Alex Gartenfeld — Wed, 12 May 2010 13:00:00 +0100

Last week saw two premieres in one night, as celebrated Swiss performance twosome Zimmerman & de Perrot debuted in New York with the ebullient "Gaff Aff" at the newly opened Jerome Robbins dance theater at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. "Gaff Aff" roughly means "Staring at a Monkey," which is a bit of Surrealist absurdity but also indicates the performance's themes of self-realization and civilization. The performance begins with a stunning series in which a cardboard box is expertly maneuvered by an invisible actor inside the box, who slides, skips and jumps fantastically; tricks us into thinking there is no one inside; and miraculously gets unclothed and clothed. Later we learn it was Martin Zimmerman all along.

The Shortlist

AiA Staff — Tue, 11 May 2010 05:00:00 +0100

Works from the estate of Michael Crichton, author, TV and film director and producer, will be auctioned at Christie’s in New York on May 11. Lots include pieces by Crichton’s friends Jasper Johns, David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg, as well as works by Picasso, Andreas Gursky, Jeff Koons, Mark Tansey and Wayne Thiebaud. Also a bit of an art critic, Crichton wrote the catalogue for Johns’s 1977 survey at the Whitney Museum.