Before the Enlightenment elevated empiricism and introduced the notion of “pseudoscience” as its foil, religion, magic, and science coexisted on a relatively level plane. Today, art remains one of few arenas that have been able to sidestep Enlightenment mandates; here, the exploration of ideas is not confined to the reproducibility of empirical data, allowing for a more unconstrained examination of the nature of things. The[…..]
At the press preview for Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, more than one member of the Whitney Museum’s curatorial staff urged visitors to dispense with “preconceived notions” about Koons and embrace the exhibition as an opportunity to view the artist’s perhaps too-well-known oeuvre with fresh eyes. One of the largest retrospectives the Whitney has ever mounted, Jeff Koons sprawls across three floors in ascending chronological order,[…..]
Phyllida Barlow has upped her game in the last five years with a string of international blockbuster shows and commissions. Omnipresent as she currently is, one would think that Barlow has always enjoyed this kind of success, but that isn’t the case; the work hadn’t received the kind of attention that anoints an artist as “successful” until her Baltic show in 2004. As she is in[…..]
#institutions #revision #making #access #nostalgia The second Made in L.A. biennial at the UCLA Hammer Museum indicates both the scope and diversity of the city’s many emerging and early-mid-career artists, and the pull that the art academy continues to exert on artists long after the completion of their degrees. The biennial’s emergence in 2012 marked a milestone in the evolution of Los Angeles as an art capital, no[…..]
Today from the DS archives, we bring you Allegra Kirkland’s review of Chronicling Catastrophe. Originally published on February 26, 2013, this article is a consideration of Enrique Metinides‘ fifty-year-long career in chronicling disasters that are, in Kirkland’s words, “anonymous crime [scenes] and hauntingly specific [tragedies].” Unfortunately, these images, and ones like them, are ever-relevant in our violent, modern world. The journalistic expression “If it bleeds, it leads” is particularly[…..]
Today we bring you Machine Project’s video documentation of Odyssey Odyssey, a play by artist and writer Johanna Kozma. Odyssey Odyssey is a contemporary take on Homer’s Odyssey, performed for an audience of two in a Honda Odyssey. This work was included in The Machine Project Field Guide to L.A. Architecture, as part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A., and originally performed from July 10–22, 2013.
From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you Live Radio Auction, a project by Wonderment Consortium—the artist team of Packard Jennings, Steuart Pittman, and Scott Vermeire. This essay was commissioned by guest editor Jonn Herschend as part of Issue 5.5, Slapstick and the Sublime, and originally published on July 10, 2014. Live Radio Auction appropriates a format from rural American radio stations in which the DJ auctions[…..]
