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Thursday, July 03, 2008
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Wet Dreams: Domes, Rides and Waterfalls Open in New York
By Rachel K. Ward
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In one of his lectures, the architect-inventor-utopian Buckminster Fuller explained that as children we are encouraged to be generalists, curious and open to anything. As we grow up, we receive the command that we must specialize in one area. Contemporary artists though are maybe the last remaining licensed generalists: while we used to expect artists to simply paint or sculpt, now they can simply be curious about the world and supervise some type of dreamlike exploration culminating in a grand performance or installation. Last week in New York, three such explorations were unveiled: pioneering work by Buckminster Fuller and Paul McCarthy at the Whitney, and Olafur Eliasson's much anticipated waterfalls in the East River.
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7:03 AM
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Tuesday, July 01, 2008
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Perplexed in Public: Can Art Still Intervene in the City?
By Ben Street
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Standing outside KFC on Brixton High Street a couple of weeks ago with a sign reading 'When Is This Going To End', New York-based artist Sharon Hayes squinted in the afternoon sun, making her look even more aggrieved than you'd expect from her punctuation-free, angrily scrawled sign. Hayes' slight, defiantly eccentric adjustment of the Saturday afternoon shopping experience bewildered a handful of passers-by. A bus glided past, emblazoned with the weirdly resonant ad 'I Am The Way, The Truth and The Life', like an answer to Hayes's non-question. She walked a little course between the bus stop and the pedestrian crossing, as if warming up for a big march. A few in the know stood at a respectful distance, taking photos. An old man stamping his walking stick on the ground hobbled up and bellowed at each one in turn: "I work for Jesus Christ! I work for England! I work for Elizabeth the Second!" When he reached Hayes he paused for a second, perhaps recognising an affinity. Hayes smiled. There were titters. It was a bit tense.
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6:28 AM
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Friday, June 20, 2008
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Roundup 11: The Best Artists This Week on artreview.com
Our guest critic, the independent curator, critic and regular reviewer for ArtReview magazine, Laura McLean-Ferris continues her selections of outstanding artists on artreview.com.
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Let's start with a bang. In Alex Hetherington's deceptively simple collage piece we see several types of explosion. While the rosy pink background and silhouetted flowers look pretty enough to be Habitat wallpaper, the top section looks like a plume of smoke from a volcano or a nuclear bomb, the bottom like a cosmic big bang or a firework. The violence of explosions (cosmic or manmade) is contrasted with the opening of petals, pulling the viewer back and forth between creative and destructive blasts, involving opening, splitting and splaying forth. For good or bad, these are processes that effect change, and the inability of the three composite pieces of this work to sit neatly together is all for the best.
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4:00 PM
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Notes from the Overground: Just Don’t Call it ’Russian’
by Victoria Camblin
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Western art-types – curators, art writers, and the like, myself included – are constantly trying to generalise about the contents of Moscow's galleries and museums. These generalisers might not approach art in other cities in the same way. Perhaps the habit is a natural reaction to the sheer newness of the Moscow art scene – and the art market in Russia at large – compared to its equivalents in New York, London, or Paris. Our generalisations tend to be applied as much to the Russian consumer's taste (think 'more is more') as they are to the artists and gallerists that supply their demands: one sees Pushkin in anything romantic, is reminded of Soviet Russia by anything red, gold, and monumental, and thinks Dostoevsky when looking at a painting of a heart on a platter.
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7:59 AM
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Tuesday, June 17, 2008
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Seaside-Specific Art: The Folkestone Triennial
By James Westcott
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"C__TS!" – so shouted someone from a passing car at the visiting art press corp as Richard Wentworth explained his project for the inaugural Folkestone Triennial, which opened this weekend. Wentworth's project is apt in the face of such local hostility (although I'm sure we did indeed look like idiot intellectual tourists): he has imported foreign plants and shrubs into various public spaces around the historic seaside-town-they-forgot-to-close-down, a town which in the 21st century is coming to terms with high immigration, high unemployment and social deprivation, and now the sudden arrival of art meant as a tool of regeneration. It's going to have its work cut out.
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10:06 AM
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Monday, June 09, 2008
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Blogging Basel: The Last Night of the Fair
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By James Westcott
The city's attention turned towards the football over the weekend in Basel, and suddenly, thankfully, the bloated artworld, which had the run of the city for the previous few days, was being cut down to size as tens of thousands of fans roamed the streets, raucous and jubilant. Early on Saturday morning I saw the Czech team, due to play Switzerland in the opening game of the European Championships that evening, wandering back into the Ramada hotel, right next to the exhibition hall. I wonder if they took some time to check out the fair? Maybe Roman Abramovic would have bought some of them.
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3:41 AM
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Sunday, June 08, 2008
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Blogging Basel: Some Gems from Scope
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By James Westcott
With its eclectic range of small to very small galleries, crammed booths, plethora of crazy sculptures and piles of flyers everywhere, Scope is the perennial jumble sale of art fairs, and the latest iteration at Basel is no different in this respect from those that have gone before over the last six years in London, New York, Miami and the Hamptons. But as at any jumble sale, you stumble upon a few gems in the clutter, and there's something very refreshing and appealing about the lo-fi approach of the fair, the lack of pretension and the hunger in the air for something more than just prestige and cash (though that would be nice too; there didn't seem to be too many people in attendance when I was there).
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3:39 AM
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Friday, June 06, 2008
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Blogging Basel: Shelter From the Storm at Volta
Category: Blogging
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by Joshua Mack
Located in the Basel container port on the Rhine, somewhere near East Bumblefucksville, Volta is everything Art Basel isn't: calm, comfortable, fresh and fun. Sixty-seven galleries are sparely installed over two floors of a warehouse suffused with natural light filtering through perspex panels in the roof. Practically no one was there when I was, and price points don't attract the Hollywood stars and Russian oligarchs that have made the main fair such a gossip-fest.
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3:36 AM
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Blogging Basel: Dubai Next at the Vitra Design Museum
Category: Blogging
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By James Westcott
A quick sortie over the border into Germany the other night brought me to the huge and serene countryside campus of über-design furniture makers Vitra for the opening in their design museum of Dubai Next, an exhibition curated by architect Rem Koolhaas and Sharjah Biennial director Jack Persekian.
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Wednesday, June 04, 2008
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Blogging Basel: Early Manoeuvres by Paula Cooper and Marlborough Gallery
Category: Blogging
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By James Westcott
Grutzi from Basel! The fair is starting to get going now, but one early glitch was the installation of Monica Bonvicini's giant, blazing light-and-text work Built for Crime (2006) at the entrance to Art Unlimited – close enough to cast its headache-inducing pulsing glare over Carl Andre's serene Lament for the children (1976/1996). Andre's gallerist, Paula Cooper, apparently demanded that either Bonvicini or Andre had to move. Guess who had to reinstall?
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3:31 AM
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