ArtSeen
In the Use of Others for the Change
By Thomas MicchelliThere were two passages when the stage was empty, dark, and throbbing with music: guttural cries in the first and blues harmonica in the second, both shot through with ripples of electric guitar. It was during those moments that the essence of In the Use of Others for the Change was laid bare.
Abstraction’s Ambiguity is Its Own Reward
By Edward M. GómezWhat is it about the expressive power of abstract art—especially abstract painting, whose ambiguity of meaning is one of its most definitive characteristics—that remains so alluring?
Gray Cat
By Ben La RoccoWalking home on Bushwick Avenue this evening, I crossed paths with a gray cat. I was walking east when he emerged from behind some garbage cans five paces up. I saw from his lean musculature and dingy fur that he was stray.
First Class / Second Class
By Cassandra NeyeneschClass is a topic conspicuously absent from our national discourse, being antithetical to our foundation myth. First Class / Second Class, the group show currently on view at Asya Geisberg Gallery, seems as good a place as any to start.
DAVID ALTMEJD
By Kara L. RooneyCanadian wunderkind, David Altmejd, has quickly garnered a reputation for his fantastical chimeras, often realized through Dionysian fusions of synthetic flesh, metal armature, mirror, and fur.
EVA HESSE and SOL LEWITT
By Stephanie BuhmannThe meeting of Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt in 1960 sparked a decade-long friendship that led to a fervent dialogue. Taking their unique relationship as its source of inspiration, the exquisite exhibition, Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt investigates the reciprocal intensity of their rapport.
GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM: The Graphic Impulse
By Thomas MicchelliIn the end, it all comes down to Otto Dix. Once again we have been privileged with his unsurpassable intaglio suite, The War (1924), which was displayed less than six months ago at the Guggenheim (Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936) and in 2005 and 2010 at the Neue Galerie (War/Hell: Master Prints by Otto Dix and Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, respectively). What, we may ask, are the gods telling us?
NEIL FARBER Slugging
By Shane McAdamsSlugging, Neil Farber’s second exhibition at Edward Thorp, supplies an ample helping of the tragicomic faux-folk art fantasies we’ve come to associate with his work, though the degree to which they are intuited or calculated by the artist will start heated debates—or reignite old ones—among viewers
SPECIALIZED VISION Curating Grace Exhibition Space
By Patricia MilderWhat is the difference between performance art, contemporary dance performance, and experimental theater? Ask that question to twenty people and you’ll get twenty different answers, though in general there is a split between people who think these kinds of differentiations are vital and useful, and those who find them limiting or beside the point.
JUDY LINN 69-76 Photographs of Patti Smith
By David St.-LascauxPicture this: It’s 1969, you’re just out of art school, and you’re with two friends, born under a star. Of the two, your girlfriend is ambitious and hardworking. Both definitely like to have their pictures taken, which is good, because you’re an aspiring photographer.
Let it End Like This
By Gail QuagliataCurator Todd Zuniga delivers a simultaneously poignant, giddy, and contemplative blow to the skull with forty-plus interpretations of death in Let it End Like This, a group show on view at apexart.
MARI EASTMAN Objects, Decorative and Functional
By Anne Sherwood PundykCherry and Martin is spelled out in compact, white neon letters centered in a long, narrow window set above eye level in a painted brick façade. Driving by the building on South La Cienega Boulevard in West Los Angeles, I think fleetingly that it might be a bar
SCOTT HOCKING
By Lynn CrawfordWhen Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo lived and worked in Detroit in the early 1930s, Rivera lauded the city as an example of, “the great saga of the machine and of steel.” Kahlo, in contrast, described it as “a shabby old village.”
Where Malevich Has Left Us Today
By Robert C. MorganAt the outset of Modernism, geometric shapes in painting and sculpture were being foregrounded by the Western avant-garde—in Russia with the Suprematists and Constructivists, in Holland with the De Stijl movement, and in Germany with the Bauhaus
Brooklyn Dispatches
By James KalmNot so long ago the mere mention of the words “art fair” could induce palpitations, hyperventilation, and uncontrollable twitching in some quarters. Everyone in and out of the art world had an opinion, some good, most bad, but as the momentum of this juggernaut continued to grow, they all agreed, this was a new paradigm, a brutal Darwinian restructuring of the art market.
Romare Bearden (1911-1988): Collage, A Centennial Celebration
By Valery OisteanuRomare Bearden (1911-1988) began as a painter whose interest was to communicate “social changes” with a figural approach often inspired by social realism. All that changed during an 18-month-long trip to France and Italy in 1950
JAMES CLARK The Luminiferous Aether
By Craig OlsonObscurity of expression is natural to the psyche. Prime example, our dreams; mere glimmerings of our esoteric selves. There are also rare instances in which these obscurities are conjured through an interaction with the exoteric, or the physical world of objects and beings.
LAUREL NAKADATE Only the Lonely
By John YauDear Laurel Nakadate: This is what I have dug up so far. You were in born in 1975 in Austin, Texas, and raised in Ames, Iowa, both university towns.
DEBORAH LIGORIO Escursione Meridionale
By David RhodesThe central piece of this exhibition is a structure of five vertical and parallel planes, open at the sides and standing floor to ceiling. The sheets of board and window screen material form a structure that is ad hoc, but elegant and open at the sides like a thick, layered, section of wall
