Art in America - Most Recent The Scene Posts

Record Heat for CANADA

Mimi Luse — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 09:00:00 +0100

For four sweltering evenings in July, New York artist and musician Sadie Laska hot-boxed the Lower East Side's CANADA Gallery. The sessions she curated, called "Slummer Nights," were music and visual art performances that seemed impartial to polish and were all the better for it. The night Art in America visited, a selection of short films chosen by Brooklyn project space Cleopatra's were buttressed by two dark comedy performances.

The Reluctant Orator

Janet Oh — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:00:00 +0100

I entered the Guggenheim Museum this past Saturday for New York-based Sharon Hayes' performance as the second half of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s historic 1963 speech, "I Have a Dream," echoed through the museum's rotunda. It's Twentieth Century America's most famous bit of rhetoric, although it's unlikely many Americans can recall more than a few lines. As a part of Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, the museum's collection show that examines how artists' photo-based works test and invigorate the image's famous relationship to death, Hayes installed behind a DJ booth on the ground floor of the rotunda and spun spoken-word records.

Portugal Looks Downtown

Darrell Hartman — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:20:00 +0100

What exactly do we call Portugal Arte, the month-long show of contemporary art in and around Lisbon that opened this past weekend? It's casually being described as a biennial, although there's neither a unifying theme nor a guarantee that it will be back in two years. It's billed in the press materials as an "international survey" of contemporary art—although you could say that it's international in the way that certain U.S. airports with the odd flight to Canada are. Without coming out and saying it, this show seems primarily to be about the American art scene in 2010—without marquee names and creatively shoehorned into a large building that isn't a museum but sort of looks like one. It's a bit random, which is not to say that it's not interesting.

East of (and Late to) Eden

Ana Vukadin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:00:00 +0100

One July afternoon in 1993, the 23-year-old founder of London gallery Factual Nonsense, Joshua Compston, staged an eccentric street fair called A Fête Worse than Death in the heart of Shoreditch. It comprised artists, not galleries. Last week, some of the participants gathered at Whitechapel Gallery to talk "Art and London's East End," and to discuss whether the scrappy ole' days might return to the very professional and serious neighborhoods. Amidst all the nostalgia, it was hard not to discuss how far they'd come!

Literary Society

Gillian Sneed — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 10:00:00 +0100

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's ten-month solo exhibition, "chronotopes & dioramas," commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation and on view at Manhattan's Hispanic Society, concluded Sunday. Located in a medium-sized gallery within the former Museum of the American Indian that was recently renovated by Dia, the work consisted of a 50-foot wide floor to ceiling structure, consisting of a wall decorated with literary quotations on one side, and containing three large meticulously constructed environmental dioramas rendered by a team of specialists from the American Museum of Natural History on the other.

BA in Art Fairs

Brienne Walsh — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:00:00 +0100

There aren't many things that you can count on being the same in every country in the world, but one such universal fact is the art fair, which migrates intact wherever it re-emerges. Such was the case at ArteBA 2010, the 19th annual art show in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that opened Thursday night. The event consisted of the type of fanfare cozily familiar for art professionals, although typically north of the equator. Over 80 galleries participated in the event, hailing from locations almost exclusively in Latin America, with the exception of a few galleries from Europe and the United States, like Fernando Pradilla from Madrid and Miami's Dot FiftyOne.

Brightest in Show

Quinn Latimer — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:00:00 +0100

In this week's Art Basel-precipitated blur of fairs, performances, museum openings, art dinners and art parties, it is sometimes difficult to ascertain exactly where one is at any given moment. Liste—the well-loved "young art fair" that is generally acknowledged to be the stepping-stone for promising young galleries on their way to Art Basel, proper—immediately made its presence felt, as within two seconds of stepping into its environs I was perusing a vitrine filled with crystal vases, skulls, and—of course—bongs.

Space is Key

Sarah Stephenson — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:05:00 +0100

The first person to receive the key to New York City (Viscount Cornbury in 1702) has gone down in the history books as being a corrupt degenerate who took bribes and misappropriated government funds. Yankees Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez got keys to New York (in 2003 and 2007, respectively). Clemens is still under investigation for using performance-enhancing drugs, and A-Rod has admitted to using them in the past. Saddam Hussein was given the key to Detroit in 1980. With 25,000 keys, Paul Ramirez Jonas looks to a more uplifting history.

Ground Beneath Their Feet

Ana Vukadin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 11:00:00 +0100

Last week a panel of six international architects and curators gathered under the aegis of Tate Modern and The Delfina Foundation to discuss new ways in which the architecture of domination can be reused by those it once dominated. The panel was chaired with deadpan humor by the writer and curator Shumon Basar, who compared the structure of the evening to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" or Wings' "Jet," saying, "the whole is comprised with a series of dissimilar episodes which slowly build up to an awe-inspiring finale."

Feel Greater

Brienne Walsh — Tue, 25 May 2010 09:00:00 +0100

Greater New York had been preceded by the speculation endemic to New York, and young artists—the who's in and who's out, which curator of the three curators (Klaus Biesenbach, Neville Wakefield, Connie Butler) did which studio visit, etc. But summer approaches and the economy is looking up, so the memo is to buck up. Meanwhile, the art world is awash with blood that's both fresh and thoroughly enmeshed in the community of of its forebears. Greater New York compels one, as participating artist Conrad Ventur so elegantly stated, "to stop feeling like shit and start to feel good."

Gilmore's Girls

Catherine Kron — Wed, 12 May 2010 10:00:00 +0100

Kate Gilmore appeared in this year's Whitney Biennial with the installation Standing Here, for which the artist videotaped from above her attempts, and ultimate success, breaking out of a drywall monolith. The video was paired with a sculptural prop, the broken wall. In Walk the Walk architecture returns, resilient and cumbersome as ever. It's Gilmore's first public performance, and the first in which she herself does not appear. Atop a ten by ten foot yellow platform elevated eight feet from the ground, seven women pace the perimeter of the structure. The structure is populated from 8:30 until 5:30, the workday, during the show's week-long run.

Diamonds Are Forever

Brienne Walsh — Mon, 10 May 2010 13:00:00 +0100

At the tail end of the perfect weather last week, a new Richard Prince exhibition, Richard Prince: The Tiffany Paintings arrived at the Gagosian Gallery uptown. The opening of the show of recent large-scale paintings and newsprint collages was celebrated at a rooftop cocktail party that could have been memorialized in society pages, and covered with thick layers of paint. The overall reception of the works was positive, although the crowd mostly lingered on the terrace outdoors, where the air was warm and the lights from Park Avenue apartments twinkled like jewels (or, perhaps, Tiffany's diamonds) as the daylight began to fade. In the crowd, a soft-spoken Jeff Koons patiently indulged fans and journalists as they swarmed to get a word with him. "I really liked the show," he told me, moving languidly towards the exit. "I thought that the paintings were very moving."

A Case of Need?

Kimberly Chou — Thu, 06 May 2010 10:00:00 +0100

New York Gallery Week kicks off tomorrow, Friday, May 7. It's actually more of a long weekend: the inaugural NYGW features a series of events and solo show openings at participating galleries, from May 7 to May 10. Look for exhibitions and artist talks at about 50 galleries, including David Zwirner, Taxter & Spengemann, Bortolami and Nyehaus, as well as a handful of non-profits, like the Drawing Center. Events are free to the public and galleries will be open extended hours. But does New York—a city where there are hundreds of art shows running at any given time—need a week dedicated to gallery exhibitions? Some in the art world think so.

Sweet Child of Theirs

Brienne Walsh — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:00:00 +0100

Jean-Michel Basquiat is a phenomenon, not least because he's an art star without anything really serious being said about his art. Granted, if you make a movie about him, and present it in MoMA's big theater with the help of LVMH and Jefferson Hack's Nowness, other art stars and the stars who collect his huge body of expensive works will come out for the event. And so on Tuesday night, Annie Liebovitz, Julian Schnabel, Clive Davis, Tommy Hilfiger, Chris Rock and Alicia Keys attended the screening of Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, a new film about the artist who's still obscure in spite of his fame and infamy.

Idolize What You Eat

Kimberly Chou — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 10:05:00 +0100

At the Brooklyn Ball last night, even before guests saw the Bruce Nauman-inspired take on cheese- part of food artist Jennifer Rubell's multi-part feast for the night—they likely smelled it. During cocktail hour, hanging sculptures cast from Rubell's own head melted onto once-neat piles of crackers. The smell of warm fontina radiated from the fifth-floor wing where hors d'oeuvres and pre-dinner drinks were held, potentially enticing the Brooklyn Museum patrons who were there early to preview a new fashion exhibition one floor below.

Reminding Us Not to Be Silent

Kimberly Chou — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:00:00 +0100

Upon being introduced to Nancy Spero's work, "one quickly realizes this is an artist that attracts attention and commentary where it wasn't always so," wrote Jon Bird, a long-time scholar of her work and that of her husband and collaborator Leon Golub. Bird's statement was read by Hans Haacke at a public tribute to the late activist-artist Sunday afternoon at the Great Hall at Cooper Union. Bird and several of the scheduled speakers did not make it to the event, due to the ash cloud still spreading over Europe after last week's Eyjafjallajokull volcano eruption.

Wikipedia: A Wide Net

Aimee Walleston — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 17:10:00 +0100

"Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge," was the presumably utopian mission statement issued by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales last Thursday night, at the beginning of his PowerPoint presentation hosted by the New Museum. Wales, who was honored as part of the museum's ongoing Stuart Regen Visionary Series (an annual series that began in 2009 with choreographer Bill T. Jones as the inaugural honoree), is founder of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the archive edited by unpaid amateurs guided by "traditions" of objectivity and neutrality.

Art of the Fashion Show

Alex Gartenfeld — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 15:30:00 +0100

A fashion show generally begins with dead time as people file in, chit-chat, and have their picture taken. A publicist screams or a light is dimmed; men and women assume their hierarchical place in the rows, culminating in an approximately ten-minute organized procession of models up and down a runway (the announced occasion for the gathering); then the audience makes a mass exodus. Order builds, and then explodes as the audience becomes suddenly intent upon congregating elsewhere, another fashion show.

Restrained By Order: Cosey Fanny Tutti at the ICA

Kate Sennert — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 10:10:00 +0100

A hundred devotees converged on London's ICA theater for a six-hour conference in homage to Cosey Fanni Tutti. The iconic performance artist and founding member of Throbbing Gristle got her moniker when the artist Robin Klassnick sent her some mail art, a component of which was a re-spelling of Mozart's comic opera Così fan tutte, loosely translated "as all women do." Of course, what Cosey has done has always been a little different, and in the mid-1970s the name Cosey Fanni Tutti was synonymous with scandal. At the ICA, speakers and artists looked for other definitions.

Artists Do the Math

John Reed — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 09:00:00 +0100

The division of art and text was, from the start, artificial; the technology of the printing press limited the art it could reproduce. Present-day media is restoring that relationship: art and text, back together, as it should be. The more difficult re-integration is art and science. The Romantics saw no distinction: scientists wrote poetry; poets contributed and borrowed from science. Artists at the Bowery Poetry Club look to mend the rift.