Talk Show at Edward Thorpe Gallery
There are two very interesting aspects to “Talk Show,” a group exhibition of painting. One is that the six participants are women. The works are representational and often figurative, the figure being always female. Yet the press release makes absolutely nothing of these facts. Nor should it. There is, happily, no point to make. There [...]
Barbara Kruger at Mary Boone
The partyline was : pay no attention to mortality. It’s a piece of pessimistic individualistic humanist self-indulgence. Which, of course, it is, in one sense. But now as the hardliners age implacable turns a placable cheek, as if the confrontation with personal extinction had finally leveled the playing field. In Barbara Kruger’s video installation, “The [...]
Burt Barr at Sikkema Jenkins
As Jonas Mekas tells of the premiere of Warhol’s film Empire –a single static shot of the Empire state building held for eight hours without camera movement or cut–the crowds were at a near riot. “We want our money back, we came to see a movie. This movie doesn’t move”. And this was at the [...]
Matt Saunders at Harris Lieberman
Matt Saunders has installed a multiplex of sorts at Harris Lieberman on Vandam Street and therein he is screening a restored homage to the lost cities of Weimar Germany. The geography of the gallery, as organized by Saunders, elicits the notion of the trawling, mobile spectator: partitions, columns, low podia, interior windows as screens doubling [...]
Jim Nutt “Trim” and Other Works
Jim Nutt’s current show of paintings and drawings at David Nolan resembles nothing so much as portraits, from observation, of the artist Orlan. I suspect this observation will not be distressing to either of the artists in question. Nutt has been torquing the represented body for a little longer than Orlan has been using representations [...]
She: Marina Abromovic at the Atrium of the Museum of Modern Art ( The Artist is Present )
Well it might be a stretch. She must think those people standing and walking around are looking. She’s kind of still there. All those people thinking she’s got something — just looking straight ahead. That long dress. That little plinth she’s standing on. That kind of white greasepaint. That pharaoh getup. Wait a minute. No [...]
Ars longa, divorce brutale.
I rode the subway. To see Robert & Ethel Scull: Portrait of a Collection that is. To have stepped onto the curb at Acquavella gallery, 59th just off 5th, and paid a cab fare would have been, well, tasteless. The Sculls have long been positioned as the Ur collectors of contemporary art in New York. [...]
Jennifer Cohen at Salon 94
JENNIFER COHEN at Salon 94 Apparently, ballet originated as a dance interpretation of fencing. And Jennifer Cohen’s clever merging of ballet imagery (she has a background in dance) and sculptural tropes is indeed a series of feints and parries. At first glance, this body of work seems simply to valorize and memorialize, with “souvenirs” such [...]
Lean at Nicole Klagsbrun.
In the end Bas Jan Ader is most remembered for disappearing. Before that it was falling. Off a roof or into a canal, from Los Angeles to London to Amsterdam he would fall. It all had a Buster Keaton hapless, sad sack quality to it. And indeed one of my favorite of his video pieces [...]
The Armory Show
Top of the wish list? That the Armory show would just go away. Alas, you dreamer it will not. At 12 years of age it is a snotty adolescent poised to outlive many of us. Indeed with 243 galleries and many thousands of art works smeared over two piers (with an asthma inducing climb from [...]
