Art in America - Most Recent News and Opinion

The War Chest of Otto Dix

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:10:00 +0100

In the exhibition of work by Otto Dix that opened this week at Neue Galerie, themes of war and sexuality literally fill the air. Memory of the Halls of Mirrors in Brussels (1920), a Dadaist painting of a leering officer and a prostitute, is suffused with Guerlain perfume and soundtracked to 1920s jazz. In the room containing Dix's etchings inspired by the first World War, there's a faint, loamy smell; for this, Neue's scent specialist sniffed out a special combination of grass and earth. Crickets chirp in the background.

New York's Satellite Fairs: Bling, String, and Subversive Things

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:02:00 +0100

Bling, string and subversive things were among the highlights at Pulse Contemporary and Scope International, just two of the at least seven satellite art fairs that set up shop in New York the same time as the Armory Show.

Fact Sheet: Jay DeFeo

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:30:00 +0100

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.

Five From the Whitney Biennial: Martin Kersels

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:45:00 +0100

"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.

Top Ten From the Armory Show Modern

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:00:00 +0100

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?

Lena Dunham's Open House

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:00:00 +0100

Filmmaker Lena Dunham treads the turbid shallows of post-college fallout. In her latest, Tiny Furniture, the artist turns the camera on herself and her immediate family. Dunham favors a sort of hybrid of allegory and docudrama, evidenced in her collaborative shorts Delusional Downtown Divas (in which childhood friends Joana Avillez, Isabel Halley and Gabriel Held play childhood friends). In her first full-length feature, Dunham again casts her own ambitions and insecurities as the star of the show. Tiny Furniture depicts a girl adrift and attempting to moor herself; the film is that moor that rescues Dunham from the ennui of a directionless year after college.

Fewer (Visible) Boundaries for Independent

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:10:00 +0100

As you walk into the first floor of the Independent Fair at the X Initiative, you're greeted by the ubiquitous Bruce High Quality Foundation's contribution, an inflatable union rat armed with monotone invectives. "Do I have your attention?" He asks, which is indeed a lot to ask at an art fair. The rat typically signifies a labor strike; its objectives here were unclear. The piece, which obstructed views of Rikrit Tiravanija's mirrored ping-pong table, was among the least friendly things about the inaugural opening.

Tie ADAA Up With a Bowtie

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:10:00 +0100

The old guard (and even a few young'uns) turned up for the gala opening of the 2010 ADAA Art Show at the Park Avenue armory, the most exclusive flea market in town. All of the sterling galleries were there, showing their best wares in the forms of Andy Warhols, Pablo Picassos and Henry Moores. Nostalgia seeped through the stalls for a time when one put on their best pearls for a visit to your dealer, who welcomed you in their space on 57th Street with a private viewing of their best modern paintings—and, if the time was right, a single malt scotch on the rocks.

McDermott and McGough Compromise With the Past

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:00:00 +0100

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.

Bloomberg Not Buying at the ADAA, But Others Are

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:34:00 +0100

A sigh of relief seems to be sounding out across the booths of The Art Show, the 22nd Art Dealers Association of America, invite-only art fair held in the Park Avenue Armory building. And while Mayor Bloomberg may have quipped in his opening speech that he wasn't there to buy art but to discuss New York's cultural community, others certainly were, since sales had already been made. 55 New York galleries and 15 national dealers weathered the storm, as one gallerist expressed when discussing the last 14 months: "We made it through. We even managed to keep hold of all of our staff."

Juicing the Independent

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:02:00 +0100

Curator Howie Chen and artist/attorney Jason Kakoyiannis have launched a new series of programs called "Juicing the Equilibrium: Critique, Value, Markets, Prices," which aims to jolt the market-critical capacities of the art world with shots of academic, para-art world realities. The two sum up the project's goals in a question: "How can the robust analytical tools and models of the social sciences—whether they be data driven, behavioral, network, or quantitative-be utilized to mend the deteriorating ability of critical practice to narrate its own complex reality?"

Five From the Whitney Biennial: Jesse Aron Green

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:10:00 +0100

How does a young artist without gallery representation show work in the Whitney Biennial? Visitors to the show certainly love an unknown pleasure—Ryan Trecartin's inclusion in the 2006 Biennial was lauded for its Lana Turner in a drugstore-style narrative of discovery. Having been given a solo show at the Tate Modern in 2008, Green isn't exactly the exhibition's dark horse—if there is such a thing.

Inside/Outside the Brucennial

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:30:00 +0100

The revolving and evolving group of young men who go by the moniker Bruce High Quality Foundation espouses the credo, "Professional Challenges. Amateur Solutions." The group's own forays into that most impractical of professions—the contemporary artist—have taken a highly un-amateur turn. BHQF has consistently positioned itself as a hybrid, showing work as a collective while directing the grassroots educational program BHQFU whose clarion call, "That's where U come in," resounds with put-on juvenilia. The line outside last night's Brucennial opening suggests both the nameless hoards of energized youth approaching Woodstock, and the Topshop opening last year, just a few blocks due East.

Themes Abound for William Kentridge

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:20:00 +0100

Unfortunately (or presciently) timed to preview of the Whitney Biennial, the MoMA opened South African artist William Kentridge's Five Themes on Tuesday night to a more subdued audience. In the atrium of the second floor contemporary art galleries, Michael Stipe, Marina Abramovic and Anna Deavere Smith mingled under a ceiling conspicuously absent of Gabriel Orozco's monumental sculpture Mobile Matrix. The crowd trickled into the galleries at a pace that allowed for an almost solitary viewing of over 120 of Kentridge's works in a range of media including animated films, drawings, prints, theater models and books.

When It Rains It Pours: Weather or Critique at the Whitney Biennial

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:20:00 +0100

The 2010 Biennial represents, as ever, the best of American art, and includes the work of 55 artists. The exhibition claims to favor no medium, or aesthetic style—although at the dinner the night before at a strange Mexican restaurant on the Upper East Side, artists showed a certain level of competitiveness about what floor they'd been put on, the ultimate loss being installation of the third floor, the floor for film and new media.

Five From the Whitney Biennial: Lorraine O'Grady

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:00:00 +0100

"There are lots of twists to me, because I'm not like your usual artist," (under-)stated Conceptual performance and visual artist Lorraine O'Grady last week. Born in Boston, the 75-year-old O'Grady (she looks and acts like an incredibly bright, beautiful person half her age) has never been comfortable in the white box, leading instead a life in pursuit of new forms of knowledge.

Florence Ostende's Tale of Two Cities

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:10:00 +0100

Paris and London are separated by no more than a tunnel—but the lack of communication, if not interest, between the two art capitals is noteworthy. Tracey Emin and Xavier Veilhan on each end have shown extensively around the world, but very little on the opposite side of the Channel. nterrogating the relationship between the two cities, and encouraging their rarefied collaboration is key to Florence Ostende's work.

Light Shows and the Fluxus Cab Driver: Jeffrey Perkins, Part II

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:30:00 +0100

Nicknamed "the Fluxus cabdriver" by Nam June Paik, Jeffrey Perkins is an artist and filmmaker who has worked in relative obscurity for over four decades, having collaborated in the 1960s with Fluxus artists including George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, and Alison Knowles. Until recently he was best known for his light projection performances and his "Movies for the Blind" (based on sound recordings of interviews with passengers in his cab). He recently completed a documentary, The Painter Sam Francis, an endeavor that was itself 40 years in the making.

The Reliable Controvery of ARCOmadrid

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:00:00 +0100

Arco, Madrid's 29-year-old contemporary art fair opened its doors to the public February 18, amidst the uncertainty provoked by Spain's dismal economy and debates about the quality of participating exhibitors. Galleries like Marian Goodman, Hauser & Wirth, Lisson, and Sao Paulo-based Luisa Strina, one-time regular exhibitors at the fair, all absented this year's edition. The Spanish art fair retained the dubious title of "world's most crowded art fair," with 150,000 visitors in just five days. Reliable controversy might be the podium on which that laurel stands.

Before They Were Winners: TVTV in New York

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:30:00 +0100

There are people who make a living of critiquing spectacle, who pump unspectacular phenomena with predictable criticisms of their meanings, consequences, or perceived lacks thereof. Virtually immune to this practice is the life of the Academy Awards, the pure spectacle that falls to earth in the form of kaleidoscopic critique: the most superficial, the most banal, and, perhaps the most interesting, impressions and speculations by the honored stars themselves. However it's usually only the less interesting, over-choreographed red carpet interviews and acceptance speeches that are seen and heard, rather than the shrewd, juicy obsessing that must go on in private.