ArtSeen
Roni Horn aka Roni Horn
By R. H. Lossin“When you say it’s water, I get suspicious….” -Roni Horn
WALID RAAD: Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World/Part 1_Volume 1_Chapter 1 (Beirut: 1992-2005)
By Kara L. RooneyThey say that there are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth. For more than two decades the Lebanese artist Walid Raad has worked within the slippery terrain defined by this categorical triptych...
RAILING OPINION: Batman, Bernini and Young Romantics
By Lisa Corinne DavisI am a painter. I am also a professor in an MFA program where I hold seminars in which I talk to students about their work. I have done this for many years, and like many artists who teach, I sometimes rage against my role...
NICOLE EISENMAN
By John YauHave seriousness and high-mindedness been placed on a pedestal to the exclusion of nearly everything else? It sure appears that way when I try to count all the exegetical tomes, essays, and reviews citing Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault while supposedly explicating a contemporary artist’s project.
Letter from BERLIN: FRANK BADUR, Why Pattern?
By David RhodesFrank Badur has been part of the Berlin scene from the time he studied here, between 1963 and 1969. He became a professor at the University of Art in 1985, and, like many other German artists who maintain successful international careers, he has continued to teach.
Letter from LONDON: JON THOMPSON, Paintings from The Toronto Cycle
By Sherman SamIn another age and another country, Jon Thompson could have been mistaken for either a pattern painter or an Op artist. He is in fact neither, though the appearance of his current work would surely attract fans of both those approaches.
MARILYN MINTER, Regen Projects, Los Angeles
By Terry R. MyersMarilyn Minter doesn’t merely use photographs; she uses them up. It is critical that for the past fifteen or so years the photographs have been hers to bleed dry: this part of her process contributes greatly to the overall cycle of creation and destruction that determines how her work is made as well as how it looks.
SAARINEN: ONE OF US?
By Joseph MasheckWhen is architecture going to send packing the hopelessly non-visual, essentially literary “cultural” culture now in its second generation of presumptuously proffering advice? How long do we have to hear otherwise cultivated people blab ignorantly on about how modernism was all cold-hearted right angles and totalitarian bullying?
ALBERS’ RECORD JACKETS: Doing an Artful Job
By Joseph MasheckA small but fascinating exhibition, Albers / Albums, at Minus Space (98 Fourth Street [doorbell 28], Brooklyn) through January 30th, shows the seven record jackets designed by Josef Albers along with a few comparable covers by others, as well as relevant ephemera and documentation from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation for context.
Picasso and the Allure of Language
By Kimberly LammPicasso and the Allure of Language takes the artist’s engagement with language beyond the smattering of words and letters that rise to the surface of Pablo Picasso’s Cubist paintings.
ARSHILE GORKY: A Retrospective
By Emily WarnerIn his 1977 memoir, dealer Julien Levy enshrined what was to be an enduring myth of painter Arshile Gorky’s career: Gorky the imitator, the apprentice who copied styles and whole works of the modern masters before breaking through, c.1943, to his own “Gorky-ness.”
ANNE TRUITT: Perception and Reflection
By Anne ByrdForty-one-year-old Anne Truitt had worked for about ten years as a figurative, expressionist sculptor in eclectic media when, in 1961, she had her first encounter with the paintings of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt. From that point on she focused on painted wood sculpture, attempting to make three-dimensional her experience of color from her earlier paintings.
NORMAN BLUHM: A Retrospective of Works on Paper, 1948-1998
By Craig OlsonNorman Bluhm was an artist dedicated to a type of artistic output and way of life that stressed the beauty, mystery, and passion of the human drama. This exhibition, encompassing 50 years of work, is a testament to that drama and a stunning example of Abstract Expressionism’s cultural inheritance.
THE BAUHAUS IDEA: How To Live with Art
By Robert C. MorganIn contrast to some of my academic colleagues, I never tired of teaching the Bauhaus in my art history classes, and I was especially delighted when I was able to introduce it to students studying the applied arts, such as industrial design, interior design, and graphics.
FOOTLOOSE AMONG THE FUNCTORS
By Shane McAdamsIn 1979, 10 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jean-Francois Lyotard characterized the condition of postmodernism as the end of grand narratives. These included Marxism, analytical philosophy, structural anthropology, you name it: if it had a telos, a Hegelian destiny, or any type of historical vector, its autopsy was written in The Postmodern Condition.
Metamorphosis Victorianus
By Valery Oisteanu“Modern Collage, Victorian Engravings & Nostalgia” is the subtitle of a scholarly exhibition that serves as a concise intro to the history of “paste-ups” from 1929 through the mid-1990s. More than 120 works from nearly seven decades of “oneiric-collage” are on display in the intimate setting of a Dada salon, contributing to a dream-narrative dredged from the subconscious.
Alias Man Ray
By Ben La RoccoAs American art drifts back toward its literary roots, the Jewish Museum has mounted a timely exhibition with an ill-chosen title. Alias Man Ray, at the Jewish Museum, is a comprehensive survey of Man Ray’s 60-year career as an artist, and what an artist he was. But Man Ray did not seek an alias, or an escape.
URS FISCHER: Marguerite de Ponty
By Kathleen Massara“Urs is an avalanche that’s eating you,” says Massimiliano Gioni in between bites of pasta. The curator is referring to the amount of work involved in setting up Urs Fischer’s solo exhibition at the New Museum, but this statement also applies to the sheer amount of work produced by the artist since coming on the scene in the early '90s.
Social Curiosities: An exhibition of new work by the 2008-2009 Fellows of the New York Academy of Art
By Sharon L. ButlerSocial Curiosities, work by the 2008-09 New York Academy of Art postgraduate fellowship recipients—Matthew Miller, Annie Wildey, and Phillip Thomas—gives me hope for what has become a dire situation for the art profession.
