ArtSeen
Unraveling Cultural Globalization
By Robert C. MorganHuman conscience must play a distinctive role in how we determine the ethical consequences of out actions in the future, and this, of course will affect the future of cultural globalization. The role of art as substantive and transformative force will only be realized if art liberates itself from the pressure of corporate constraints.
Always a Little Further
By Thomas MicchelliWith Always a Little Further, curator Rosa Martínez has taken Venice’s impossibly vast brick-and-limestone Arsenale—the 500-year-old shipyard serving as an adjunct venue for the 51st Biennale—and filled it with a bristling array of audacious, turbulent and visionary art.
Barry McGee
By Megan HeuerA six-by-eight foot cube of thin, sagging plywood boards forms the entryway to Barry McGee’s sprawling exhibition One More Thing at the cavernous Deitch Projects space on Wooster Street. Stepping into an installation of riotous color and noise through the door in the far right corner, you look back over your shoulder to discover that you have just emerged from a crappy-looking truck turned over on its side.
Andrea Zittel
By Katie StoneRecent visitors to the Andrea Rosen Gallery may have sensed an uncanny edge in the air. Although everything was very still, there was an underlying flurry—a calm sea as it were—that pervaded the space.
Jack Goldstein Paintings: 1980–1985
By Robert C. MorganI first heard of Jack Goldstein through a mutual friend by the name of Paul McMahon. They knew each other at Cal Arts in the early seventies and were both students of John Baldessari. At that time, Baldessari was a guru to many young artists, many of whom became the core of the by-gone postmodern generation of the eighties.
Greater Brooklyn
By Stephanie BuhmannNine weeks after the opening of the much-discussed Greater New York show at P.S. 1, Chelsea’s CRG Gallery opens its summer program with a tongue-in-cheek counterpart entitled Greater Brooklyn. Inspired by the fact that most of New York’s younger generation of artists are based in Brooklyn, this exhibition features thirty artists who have only two things in common: they live in or close to this borough and they continue to pursue their art-making without steady gallery representation.
Works on Paper
By James KalmOn the heels of Raising the Bar, the critically acclaimed painting show that paired Thornton Willis and James Little, Vered Lieb and Richard Timperio have co-curated this show and selected some of New York’s most enduring, though perhaps lesser known, abstract painters. Willis and Little both participated in Barbara Rose’s American Painting: The Eighties exhibit, which though flawed, refocused critical and artistic attention on a phase of post-minimal, post-Greenbergian abstraction that is still the impetus for a large sector of current activity.
John Beech
By Stephanie BuhmannBorn in 1964, in Winchester, England and currently living in Brooklyn, John Beech is known for his innovative transformations of seemingly mundane industrial objects into extraordinary epitomes of mysterious beauty.
Wall-to-Wall Drawings: Selections Summer 2005
By Chris HowardRosana Castrillo Diaz’s two contributions to this group exhibition use the base concept of drawing—pencil marks on a flat surface—but they’re scarcely visible. In fact, I didn’t even notice them in my first few circles around the gallery.
Arthur Simms
By Roger KamholzThe allure that draws passersby toward a junk shop window likewise draws us to Arthur Simms’s clunky sculptures of discarded objects entangled in networks of knotted hemp rope.
Robert Berlind
By Ben La RoccoOne of the great challenges of painting the landscape is overcoming one’s romantic response to it. This is just what much of the Hudson River School failed to do. In their work, the artist’s emotional response to the natural world replaces a true feeling of nature, of the world as it is. Strong landscape painters avoid this fate by coming to grips with history, examining its products and learning from them.
John Jacobsmeyer
By James KalmHow does an artist who has an abiding respect for a grand ancient tradition and a desire to remain completely contemporary, meld these two opposing urges? John Jacobsmeyer utilizes his abundant skills to perform a provocative pastiche transposing the classic techniques of under-painting and glazing to the project of depicting sci-fi B-movie and TV characters from the fifties and sixties.
Dana Frankfort
By Shane McAdamsOf the large supply of concrete subject matter available to contemporary painters, nothing is more literal than text. And no concrete form does a better job of transferring meaning to an image than a sequence of letters that make up a word.
Takeshi Yamada
By Allison DeversLadies and gentlemen, you’ll be astounded and bewildered at the out-and-out grit and gumption displayed in a single exhibition of artwork at Coney Island’s Sideshow by the Seashore, as artist Takeshi Yamada endeavors (with ample assistance from the freakshow’s performers), without fear or malice, to break every art-world commandment this side of the Atlantic.
Ideal
By Ben La RoccoMetaphor Comtemporary Art’s show of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) is remarkable for several reasons. Metaphor is a relatively young gallery that has established a reputation for showing young artists. The AAA, established in 1936 for the purpose of promoting abstract art at a time when it was genuinely embattled, is anything but young. The presence of such a group in such a gallery is a view into history through a very contemporary lens. The show’s second distinction rests with the AAA itself and its newfound openness to curators.
