The revamped Museum of Contemporary Art Australia opened its doors with Marking Time, an exhibition exploring time, duration and mortality. Jim Campbell’s ‘Last Day in the Beginning of March 2003’, a reimagining of the last 24 hours in his brother’s life, is a transfixing experience. One enters the dark space into the sound of rain. Pools of flickering light illuminate wall texts identifying single moments such as[…..]
Running alongside Tenth Avenue for approximately twenty blocks in Chelsea, The High Line has become a household term amongst Manhattanites since 2009 when it first became accessible as a public park. Since then – and especially within the last year – The High Line has ignited widespread murmur relating to its breathtaking architecture, imaginative urban integration and more recently its emergence as the local gallery[…..]
What makes a tale “twice told”? For Nathaniel Hawthorne, who published a collection called Twice Told Tales, these were stories that had already lived one life by having been previously printed. And for William Shakespeare, who coined the phrase, a “twice-told tale” was the most tedious tale of the lot, borrowed and uninspired. Shakespeare, however, had not met Stephanie Washburn. In the case of Washburn’s[…..]
In The Savage Mind (1962), Claude Lévi-Strauss made a case for “the intrinsic value of a small-scale model” of art, legitimising the art of the miniature because it “compensates for the renunciation of sensible dimensions by the acquisition of intelligible dimensions”. The miniature or the microcosmic representation is, as Lévi-Strauss rationalised, a schematic reduction permitting immediate intelligibility, because it essentially constitutes a bona fide experience[…..]
The thing about traveling on an airplane is that we take for granted how phenomenally absurd it is. There we sit, unfazed, hurdling through space at 500 miles per hour, 30,000 feet above the ground in a metal tube, surrounded by complete strangers whom in all likelihood we will never see again. There is also the unspoken airplane etiquette that we all hope the stranger[…..]
A version of this post was originally published on the Art21 blog a year ago, right after the second CicLAvia, a city-wide event that closes down seven miles of city streets. The fourth CicLAvia happens in L.A. this Sunday, April 15. L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Reyner Banham, a British architectural historian, had blatant enthusiasm for Los[…..]
Surrounded by 100 billion suns, it is nearly impossibility to not let feelings of insignificance take over – simply a minute speck standing within a vast universe. The macrocosmic nature of Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s work cultivates these diminutive impressions – whether we are listening to the sounds of silence reflected off the moon, or looking far back into the universe to a place where[…..]
