The Brooklyn Rail
Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture
JUL-AUG 2007
ArtSeen
Ready Mades at Urban Outfitters
by Cassandra NeyeneschArtSeen
Mass-produced canvases for sale at Urban Outfitters, though of course decorative, offer a pointed commentary about the way art is produced and thought about and the consumer’s relationship to it.
Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns, and Mermaids
Frogs: A Chorus of Colors
by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
ArtSeen
With MoMA sporting a forty-year retrospective of Richard Serra, the Whitney Museum’s Summer of Love, and Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum, why, with time-stamped ticket in hand, would an artist want to see a bunch of live frogs and storied fossils housed in a marble mausoleum?
LuminaTO Arts Festival: Cultural Makeover for New York's Northern Counterpart
by David MarkusArtSeen
The slogan of Toronto’s LuminaTO arts festival is “see the world in a new light.” However, its organizers make no apologies about the fact that LuminaTO is very much about seeing the city of Toronto in a new light—as an emerging cultural Mecca.
Richard Tuttle
Memory Comes from Dark Extension
by Jeremy Sigler
ArtSeen
Last summer I introduced my one-year-old daughter to a new bin of art supplies and, within minutes, she was putting out a steady stream of fantastic assemblages, which I immediately pinned up around the room.
Liz Brown Most Triumphant
by James KalmArtSeen
“Local motorist performs death-defying jump through ring of fire and is abducted by mysterious UFO, full details at eleven.” This is the king of breathless tease that baits us into tuning in for the news, or turning to the next page of those supermarket tabloids.
Marilyn Bridges In the Footsteps of Alexander
by Stephanie BuhmannArtSeen
An aerial photographer equipped with a pilot’s license, Marilyn Bridges has long focused on ancient sites.
Letter from London
by Sherman SamArtSeen
Varda Caivano at Chisenhale Gallery and Sam Basu at Kate Macgarry
Brooklyn Dispatches
by James KalmArtSeen
“Don’t talk, paint. If you can express what you want in words you should be a writer or poet, not an artist.”
Art 38 Basel and Beyond
by Shane McAdamsArtSeen
In my original notes covering the Basel art circus, I emphasized what, in retrospect, seems a tired take on the art fair phenomenon.
Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) 1985–1995
by Craig OlsonArtSeen
This is some strange, gutbucket picture making. Like an electric guitar, sounding tinny and raw without amplification, or the taste of a stone after days without water, Don Van Vliet’s uncouth, dry pictures claw their way out at us.
Don Van Vliet
by John YauArtSeen
Trying to make Don Van Vliet the painter and Captain Beefheart the musician and songwriter, not to mention Don Van Vliet the poet, fit under one umbrella, is like trying to climb Mount Tamalpais backwards. One can do it, but what’s the point?
Stuart Arends Wedges and A-Squares
by John YauArtSeen
Since 1980 Stuart Arends has been using a box as both a support and a surface. In 1985, he began working on a small cube that extended out from the wall. While he painted all six sides, the emphasis was on the three most visible.
From Berlin to Broadway:
The Ebb Bequest of Modern German and Austrian Drawings
by Stephanie Buhmann
ArtSeen
From Berlin to Broadway is the Kurt Weill-inspired title of an installation of 43 early-twentieth-century German and Austrian works on paper that the Morgan Library & Museum received in 2005 as a bequest from Broadway lyricist Fred Ebb (1928–2004).
Realicide
by Warren FryArtSeen
“Face melting” does not do Realicide justice. It’s more akin to skull melting and face imploding. The visceral quality of their primordial screams was buoyed and punctuated by the distressed noise and tornado thuds issuing from an expertly flitted mixer: the umbra of the curled fist.
